By the time you put away your Christmas decorations at the end of 2013, you should be breaking out the ICD-10 workbooks for your physicians. According to the recommended CMS timelines, January 1 should be the beginning of comprehensive training on documentation improvement for clinical and coding staff.
But while coders, billers, and payers have a very clear motivation for learning the new system, many physicians are less aware of the urgency and less likely to change their daily habits to accommodate a downstream switch that has little direct impact on patient care. Here are some tips to consider when developing an educational program for the clinical team.
It’s All About Them
Physicians are no more selfish than anyone else in a healthcare organization, but that doesn’t mean you can rely on pure altruism to motivate them into making necessary changes. Everyone wants to know how a new process will impact their everyday routine, and everyone needs one good reason for them, specifically, to make the effort.
So far, ICD-10 hasn’t presented physicians with a very compelling argument. “From a physician’s perspective, [ICD-10] doesn’t seem to make much sense,” acknowledges Juergen Fritsch, Chief Scientist at M*Modal.
The first challenge for an ICD-10 educator is to convince physicians that the value derived from ICD-10, including more granular information for medical research and population health analytics, is worth changing a step or two of their workflow. “They’d have to buy in to the bigger premise about getting richer data and more fine grained data for billing purposes,” Fritsch says.
“Really, at the end of the day, it all boils down to the documentation. If physicians don’t learn how to create better documentation, then the coders won’t be able to do their job.” That means the organization can’t get paid, and physicians might find themselves out of work when the hospital starts dipping into the red.
Figuring out how to personalize that message, tailoring it to the attitudes and culture of your organization, should be the first step in your educational plan.
Physicians flock together, so make use of their peers
Any big project needs evangelists. Whether it’s EHR adoption or ICD-10, using physician champions to persuade colleagues of the benefits of change can be an effective strategy. For physicians, much of their ICD-10 work revolves around clinical documentation improvement: adding more detail to their notes to give coders the specificity they need to choose the correct code.
But “physicians don’t want to be told that they don’t document well,” says Kerry Martin, CEO of VitalWare. “And they don’t want to learn how to document better. The famous line is, ‘I’ve got five minutes, teach me about ICD-10.’” Make the best use possible of those five minutes by having a fellow physician that speaks the same language do the talking.
“When we talk about physician education, I’m a big proponent of physician-to-physician education,” agrees Mel Tully, MSN, CCDS, CDIP, VP of Clinical Services and Education at Nuance. “That’s one of the ways that physicians respond the best. It’s very important to provide education that’s specific to their specialty.
They don’t want to know all about documentation for oncology if they’re a cardiologist. They want to know what they need for their cardiology practice, so physician-to-physician focused education is best.”
Bite-size at the right time will help the knowledge stick
That specialty-specific education can’t be overwhelming in scope, however. Providing clinical staff with small nuggets of targeted ICD-10 education over a longer period of time can help them retain more concepts than sticking them in an eight-hour seminar on a Saturday a month before go-live.
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Photo courtesy of: Medical Coding News
Originally published on: EHR Intelligence
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