Virtusa offers critical tool to assess ICD-10 transition costs

Wednesday, 4 May 2011 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Virtusa Corporation, a global IT services company that offers a broad spectrum of business consulting and outsourcing services, announced that it has designed a customised migration assessment tool to help healthcare organisations determine the potential financial impact of transitioning from ICD-9 to ICD-10.

The conversion, which is mandated to take effect by October 2013, will multiply the number of available diagnosis and procedure codes from the current 24,000 to more than 155,000. The end result promises to positively transform the healthcare industry by ultimately reducing costs and improving the quality of patient care.

Many healthcare organisations, however, are justifiably concerned about how the changeover will impact revenue cycles. Virtusa’s complimentary, cloud-based financial modelling solution offers a resource that provides peace of mind and insight by allowing organisations to test various pricing scenarios and gauge the economic impact on different areas of operation, including billing and payment schemes, provider billing practices, use of mapping tools, medical policy coding, coding errors and fraud and abuse editing.

“Virtusa’s Financial Modeller is absolutely the type of tool payers and providers need to achieve a competitive advantage as they move to ICD-10,” said James Swanson, Director, Healthcare Practice, Virtusa. “Even though organisations have the new code set, many have yet to look at the possible disruptions to cash flow, such as delayed collections and lower reimbursement. The Financial Modeller is a specialised tool that will allow healthcare organisations to identify gaps to the revenue and reimbursement cycle and determine what remediation is required to counteract the shortfalls and achieve a net zero impact.”

The ICD-10 migration also opens up numerous other business transformation opportunities for healthcare payer and provider organisations. The enhanced data capture and tracking capabilities allowed in ICD-10 can help healthcare organisations initiate enterprise-wide makeover projects to optimise their business operations systems and processes for increased efficiency and profitability.

Virtusa provides end-to-end Information Technology (IT) services to Global 2000 companies. These services, which include IT consulting, application maintenance, development, systems integration and managed services, leverage a unique Platforming methodology that transforms clients’ businesses through IT rationalisation. Virtusa helps customers accelerate business outcomes by consolidating, rationalising and modernising their core customer facing processes into one or more core systems.

Virtusa delivers cost-effective solutions through a global delivery model, applying advanced methods such as agile and accelerated solution design to ensure that its solutions meet the clients’ requirements. As a result, its clients simultaneously reduce their IT operations cost while increasing their ability to meet changing business needs.

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Massachusetts, Virtusa has operations in North America, Europe and Asia.