As the October deadline for switching to ICD-10 comes ever closer, health care organizations are looking to their peers and to their payor partners for real-world practical advice. Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, health benefits company serving primarily members in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maine, shared its lessons learned from ICD-10 implementation at the Massachusetts Health Data Consortium’s March 10 conference on ICD-10 planning.

Among the challenges and lessons Harvard Pilgrim learned were:

1. Gain ongoing support from leadership early on.
2. Engage business stakeholders early and involve them in planning and implementation.
3. Manage key dependencies to decrease their impact on the timeline.
4. Understand how data should drive implementation strategies, but don't assume ICD-10 implementation is just an IT issue.
5. Tightly manage the change control process. “We didn’t make it easy for people to change dates. That was not popular, but it worked,” Hunt noted.