Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaledition.com/i/96304
Crying Wolf by JENNIFER WEBSTER ICD-10 Hype Stirs COMPARISONS to Y2K Y2K veterans remember a turn-of-the-century era when enterprise IT made itself heard. They also remember the anticlimactic aftermath. Will ICD-10 be same song, second verse? And is that a bad thing? On the 10-year anniversary of Y2K, Computerworld reflected on a series of Y2K milestones, good and bad, for enterprise IT. The good: Y2K anxiety put IT on the map. CIOs received blank-check budgets for Y2K amelioration. The IT field saw a flowering of collaborations as people came together over a shared concern. Best of all, thanks to more than a year of due diligence, the doomsday premonitions of IT never happened. The bad: After a year of touching every application in the company portfolio, and neglecting everything else, IT landed in the doghouse. It was hard to prove that widespread predictions of empty bank accounts, nuclear plant meltdowns, and general mayhem would have come true without IT's intervention. Many businesses felt they had panicked and overspent for nothing. Is the current spate of articles, blogs, and webinars comparing ICD-10's October 2014 implementation deadline to Y2K just a scare tactic? The Wall Street Journal in February compared ICD-10 to Y2K in a swipe at vendors overhyping their products. Vendors, for their part, have used the Y2K analogy to press sales. But how difficult will the transition to ICD-10 really be, and what's the exposure for healthcare organizations that don't spend big? Explaining the transition to ICD-10 code sets in terms of technology, Gordon Merrill, surgical systems analyst with Erlanger Health System in Chattanooga, Tenn., draws upon Y2K as the clearest application-level parallel. "With Y2K [many applications] didn't have enough data field characters to have a date with more than two characters," Merrill says. Similarly, in the healthcare field, MDNEWS.COM I MD NEWS Twin Cities | 27