Joining the growing collective of consultancies, industry bodies and healthcare writers crying out that providers and payers are letting time slip away without making enough HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 progress, AHIMA reported that it's own member base, too, is off to a late start.

AHIMA found that “52 percent of the 838 AHIMA members who took the April 2010 survey said they had not,” started either HIPAA 5010 or ICD-10 projects, according to an article in the Journal of AHIMA. “Of those, 20 percent said preparation would not begin for six months or more. Nearly half did not know when work would begin.”

[Related: AAPC's 16 steps that ease ICD-10 implementation. See also: Q&A on ICD-10 worst case scenario.]

More telling, perhaps, is that even though AHIMA – as well as several other industry consortiums and consultancies, for that matter – recommend that healthcare organizations should have instituted HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 task forces internally by late 2009, AHIMA realized that “77 percent of facilities had either not started or just started determining their organizational structure and responsibilities for these projects.”

AHIMA is not alone with its somewhat dire HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 findings. Indeed, AHIMA's article follows a HIMSS most recent HIPAA 5010/ICD-10 Provider Readiness Survey that only 38 percent of providers have begun HIPAA 5010 initiatives while 35 percent have no plans for doing so in place yet.

Our own, albeit smaller, ICD10Watch reader poll uncovered that some 60 percent of healthcare organizations are uncertain whether they'll meet the CMS-recommended Level 1 compliance date of January 1, 2011. That means they've either not started HIPAA 5010, or they're behind the timeline.

And fitting HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 into the larger context of healthcare change occurring in America, McKinsey Quarterly reported that ICD-10 is among the regulations that will demand payers transform 90 percent of IT architectures – those others being healthcare reform and stimulus package healthcare IT mandates.

AHIMA's article “Three short years: Organizations lagging in 5010 and ICD-10 progress,” is in the September issue of The Journal of AHIMA.