Building an ICD-10 appliance is an idea that was bound to arise -- appliance in the IT sense, that is -- and HighPoint Solutions "this summer" is planning to issue an early version of one such device.

The timing makes sense: With everything else on healthcare IT shops' to-do lists, including meaningful use, HITECH Act, healthcare reform, and more, anything that can help ease the ICD-10 transition has the potential to be very welcome.

Think of it much like a hardware-software black box that can be plugged into your network and, ideally at least, serve as a business process management layer that handles ICD-10 conversion and mappings.

"We've come up with this idea of treating ICD-10 coding as a piece of master data management and so from that you would have your mappings in the appliance regardless if you’ve got 100 packaged applications that use this coding scheme in your environment or custom-developed applications," Pamela Ruebelmann, vice president of healthcare for HighPoint Solutions told ICD10Watch. "You can have this single business process management layer that accesses the mappings and you could incorporate your rules for using those mappings so that the business rules apply uniformly."

[Related: ICD-10 and RAC, better together. See also: Top 5 HIPAA 5010, ICD-10 hurdles. See also: CMS 9 benefits of ICD-10.]

Such an appliance could help customers avoid both using the somewhat questionable ICD-9 to ICD-10 crosswalks and full remediation of back end-systems until, Ruebelmann says, healthcare organizations reach the point of seeing a strategic reason for that remediation.

However they choose to do so, whether via an appliance, crosswalks, GEMs or other options, taking the tack of simply meeting the mandate initially with plans to remediate or upgrade applications to actually harvest benefit from ICD-10 down the road is becoming more of a reality for healthcare organizations. Deloitte consultants, in fact, said that many payers, as they move from planning into implementation, are finding the conversion more challenging than expected, enough so to adjust their expectations accordingly.

That said, Ruebelmann points out that HighPoint's appliance is not a panacea. "It's not a toaster that you put in bread and you get out toast. There's still work. We're just expecting it to be less work than upgrading every application," she says. "If you think about the whole job of remediating everything that might use a diagnosis code in your environment, you’re talking about a very large task with a lot of dollars associated with it and some question about what the ROI is. This gives you a longer runway to determine that and allows you to start seeing data come in and build a knowledge base over time that would help you make more informed decisions."

Ruebelmann added that HighPoint has a conceptual model built and is currently working with a technology partner to put it on an enterprise platform, and a spokeswoman confirmed it will be available in "late July, early August."

Ruebelmann continued that HighPoint is also considering offering the functionality as a cloud-based service, as an increasing number of vendors are turning to the cloud for HIPAA 5010 and ICD-10 compliance.