The ICD-10 go live date came and went on Oct. 1, with many organizations reporting small, if any, hiccups. One of those organizations was Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, with CIO John Halamka, MD, reporting on his team's first few days. 

Many in the press have asked me about the first few days of ICD-10. The answer for my institution, like many, is that other than a few small refinements, the impact has been unnoticeable.

We trained 850 ambulatory clinicians in comprehensive ICD-10 code entry, and all are entering electronic billing tickets using the new vocabulary.

All our provider order entry systems have Medicare Advanced Beneficiary Notification logic using ICD-10, and our clinicians are using it.

[See also: Live ICD-10 updates: Get the latest news, reactions to the code change.]

Every financial system is able to process both ICD-9 and ICD-10 to support patients who were admitted on 9/30 and discharged on 10/1.

We added some subtle post go-live modifications to decision support logic, ensuring all ICD-10 codes are supported, and we modified some very esoteric charge entry items directly related to the transition day.

[See also: 4 top vendors for ICD-10 outsourcing and ICD-10: Inside the war rooms.]

Our ICD-10 go live scorecard listed only five minor issues across all sites which our local teams were able to review and quickly close.

Congratulations and thanks to all involved in this extremely smooth go live. Our next steps will be monitoring the coding of the initial inpatient cases and payer submissions along with watching reimbursements over the next 60 days. We've done all we can to prepare. Let's hope the ecosystem around us can process our transactions with the same resilience.