While the year delay to October 2014 for the implementation of ICD-10 was welcomed by most in the healthcare industry, ICD-10 experts say it doesn’t allow for organizations to relax their transition efforts. And it is for this reason that a day-long educational ICD-10 Symposium will again be offered on Sunday, March 2 at the 2013 HIMSS Annual Conference & Exhibition.

Spanning five separate sessions, the symposium is intended to provide both big picture implementation advice, as well as some nitty-gritty, in-the-trenches training and education that can help all organizations improve their ICD-10 implementations.

“This is one of our last-ditch efforts to try to educate as many people as possible on how to implement ICD-10,” said Juliet Santos, senior director of business-centered systems with HIMSS. “In order to do that effectively and cover as much as possible, that is why we have a full day session.”

Last year’s event drew more than 300 attendees, and Santos said symposium organizers are planning to have between 300 and 500 attendees registered for this year’s sessions. Among the five hour-long presentations, Santos said the first and last are ones not to miss.

Kicking off the symposium at 8:15 is the session, “5010 Lessons Learned: The Go Forward Plan for ICD-10.”  The session will examine the recent move to HIPAA 5010, the difficulties some organizations encountered in that transition and how those lessons can be applied to help with the ICD-10 transition.

Rounding out the day is “All Hands on Deck for ICD-10 Testing: Progress Report on the HIMSS/WEDI Multi-Stakeholder Pilots.” Presenters Joe Miller of AmeriHealth Mercy, Jim Daley of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina and co-chair of the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), and Kari Gaare of CMS, will describe a joint initiative between HIMSS and WEDI to pilot a proposed ICD-10 multi-stakeholder testing methodology for validating ICD-10 preparedness.

“The ICD-10 national pilot is the only program of its kind for across the enterprise of healthcare,” Santos said. “We are trying standardize data so people can use the same process.” Further, she added, attendees can also discover in the session how they can participate in the program.

Other sessions of the symposium include: “From Coding to Communication: ICD-10 Readiness for You and Your Clinical Team”; “ICD-10 and Meaningful Use: When Worlds Collide!”; and “ICD-10: An Opportunity to Improve Financial Enterprise Performance Through Collaboration”.