Lately, I’ve come across a lot of Health IT vendors who are placating their clients by telling them to sit back, relax and let their EHR handle the ICD-10 transition. Though the right EHR will play a crucial role in your ICD-10 success, a topic we will touch upon in the coming few days, please know that there is no substitute for training and preparedness. Physicians and their staff must practice coding in the new environment and the sooner you adjust your workflows to make that happen the better.

For our part, we can only help you with your learning curve. Our Road to ICD-10 series did just that for most physicians. We helped you make crucial decisions regarding the future of your practice and also suggested ways to improve physician documentation to meet medical necessity under ICD-10, without ending up in fraudulent coding audits.

We also shared a freebie, a Common Code ebook, for some specialties to help you with your training. But please be advised that such coding books can only take you so far. You must make sure that you learn the usage of ICD-10 codes and its corresponding documentation to avoid unnecessary payment disruptions come October 1.

To help you in that endeavor, our latest infographic on training for ICD-10 spells out the correct methodology for selecting ICD-10 codes. We weigh the pros and cons of numerous methods such as

• Common code lists
• GEMs
• Alphabetic Index in ICD-10-CM coding books
• Tabular Lists in ICD-10-CM coding books

To determine which method has the most utility.

Based on expert advice and our own practice for ICD-10 coding, we can safely conclude that you can train using any of the first three methods; but always crosscheck from a tabular list in ICD-10-CM coding books.