Dive Brief:
- A new blog post by CMS' Acting Administrator Andy Slavitt reflects on the 2015 transition to ICD-10 and how the experience brought home to CMS its growing role in increasingly complex implementations ranging from HealthCare.gov, to ICD-10, and to new payment systems.
- "It was clear that CMS had an enormous opportunity – after everything we learned from HealthCare.gov – to take the lead in smoothly implementing this new policy," Slavitt wrote.
- The blog details how four main elements of the ICD-10 implementation have become CMS' "doctrine for getting things done."
Dive Insight:
Healthcare stakeholders would likely offer mixed reviews of the switch, as at the time, there was most notably some angst over how repeated deadline extensions resulted in the loss of momentum and some disbelief the switch would actually ever come to pass. However, despite that and some Y2K-esque fears that chaos would ensue, the transition was strikingly quiet.
Here are CMS' four main takeaways from the experience:
- Be customer focused;
- Be highly collaborative;
- Be responsible and accountable; and
- Be driven by metrics.
Among its top achievements during the implementation, CMS notes when it received about 1,000 inquiries during the first month, it met its goal of responding to all of them within three business days. "We will never achieve perfection, but we will be visible and hold ourselves accountable for solving problems," Slavitt wrote.