Testing experiences during ICD 10 migration.

 Organizations have faced challenges in delivering quality integrated system to support transformations from ICD 9 to ICD10.Apart from Government organizations, plans, providers the information technology service firms were also in the race of testing ICD as  part of their end-user reporting needs and healthcare products that gives insights on care, quality and risk .

 To reach the October 1st 2015 deadline the functional testing for ICD Migration has been more of a qualitative rather than quantitative. The very traditional testing ways are broken down for better understanding the change as this impact across many systems in the organization. Since the goal of ICD10 is to provide more precise descriptions of diagnosis for better treatment, care quality, risk and accurate claim payment, the testing areas are identified right from the data Integration to the reporting area. With this understanding, the testing scope was more towards the internal systems to make sure the flow of the ICD data is accurately represented for the external vendor reports.

 Our involvement started with the initiation phase of understanding the business need and the overall impacts that will arise due to quality issues. The goal of functional testing is to ensure that software components are working correctly

 As the impact of ICD is across the systems in the organization, this exhaustive testing began with a plan listing down the assumptions, risks followed by identifying test scenarios, test data, test environments and validations that are to be performed. The testing scenarios defined (both positive and negative) should be re-usable and able to link with the business requirements.

 Test data is the key component for test strategy. It ensures that several key system functions are producing data as expected. Data quality issues arise from incorrect field validation which causes in-accurate claims projection, quality and risk rates to fail.

 Below are the few major key points while performing ICD Testing

• Validation of code should be done as per the new ICD code structure
• Verify the fields in the user forms are consistently mapped with the corresponding database table(s).
• As part of integration testing, testing is completed when the combined parts of a software program function together correctly with the updated ICD code specifications.
• Whenever a certain action is performed in the front end application, a corresponding CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and delete) action gets invoked at the back end. Testing team should verify if the right action is invoked and the invoked action in itself is success or not
• End-to- End Testing should be performed to ensure that data integrity is maintained between various system components and systems are working as expected

 To have a qualitative testing, all the testing team members should have proper domain knowledge to understand the impacts. Each system solves different business needs and having a multiphase testing approach will help us to define the quality for different objectives. The end goal for ICD testing is to have clinical, financial, quality and risk accuracies within the systems.