Kick-starting Your ICD-10 Project: Identifying your Business Processes – Part 1

If you’re a healthcare organization impacted by the ICD-10 mandate, you’ve got a lot of work to do between now and the implementation date - which will likely be October 1st, 2014. Your focus needs to start with your most important core assets: the people, business processes and technologies with which you provide value and service to your customers.

But do you even know what assets you hold in your portfolio? Do you have a formal accounting and understanding of your core assets? Identifying your core assets and clearly understanding their current states as early as possible is a critical foundational component for driving and sustaining the gap, impact and SWOT analyses required to kick start and accelerate your ICD-10 compliance project toward a sound outcome.

Additionally, with a little extra upfront planning and additional effort as you progress through your ICD-10 project, your organization can generate valuable intellectual property that will provide added value both immediately and long after your ICD-10 project has been completed.

What do you do for a living? Identifying your business artifacts 

Healthcare has a lot of unique terminologies, acronyms, jargon, glossaries and taxonomies and most healthcare firms typically assign their own meaning to these definitions. In order to promote a common point of reference and understanding, you should define and maintain a master list of all the nomenclatures and definitions used in your company.

As you define your business terms, create a high-level inventory of your business processes, operating procedures, policies, how-to instructions, and support documents – both business and technical in nature. 

To help identify, define, and categorize your business artifacts: 

1. Ask your staff “What are the key resources (procedures, manuals, etc.) that you use to do your job?” 

2. Determine how the artifact is impacted by ICD-10. Ex. Documentation, User Interface, DB Schema, File Interface, Business Logic, Data Mapping, User Training, etc.

3. Does the artifact generate, receive or pass through ICD-10 attributes?

4. Who owns the artifact? From a subject matter, operational and technical point of view.

5. Consider noting any differences in meaning that individual departments or functions may have for the same term or process.

6. Gather each artifact into a centralized location, tag it with key attributes like its criticality to your overall business, whether the item is impacted by ICD-10 or related elements like diagnosis related groups (DRG’s), whether it is touched by an external entity, etc.

7. Organize your artifacts into some sort of content management system to ease their access, use and your ongoing need to curate them.

8. Socialize the existence of these assets, their value and how ICD-10 impacts each one to your staff.

As you gather and record each artifact, make an attempt to identify primary relationships and dependencies between key processes and functions. This information will prove helpful later on to improve and streamline business processes through consolidation into other processes or applications. 

For additional information related to inventorying your core business assets impacted by ICD-10, see my previous post Building an Inventory of Assets for Your ICD-10 Assessment and Other Projects


This is part 1 of a 3 part series on kick-starting your ICD-10 assessment and remediation project. In the next part, I will identify some tasks, questions and ideas related to Inventorying Software Applications and other technology assets in your portfolio.