Brilliant: Hannah Galvin Looks at ICD-10’s Five Stages of Grief

Hannah Galvin, MD has a great article on Healthcare IT News talking about ICD-10’s five stages of grief. You can go read the article to see how she describes it, but the five stages of grief are:

  1. Denial
  2. Anger
  3. Bargaining
  4. Depression
  5. Acceptance

Pretty fascinating way to describe people’s response to ICD-10. I think we have people and organizations that are still at all 5 stages of grief associated with adopting ICD-10. Although, I think most people have bridged #3.

There are still many people that are in denial and that are angry about ICD-10. Although, that population is getting smaller and smaller. I don’t see many people still bargaining. We went through that stage for years, but I believe it’s over. The largest group of people are stuck in stage 4. I know very few people who aren’t depressed over ICD-10. The HIM profession is more excited about ICD-10 than anyone else, but otherwise it’s a general depression around the change. It’s hard to implement something where you’re not sure what value you’ll receive from it. I think that’s many people’s perspective.

Dr. Galvin’s final comment in the article linked above is also interesting: “Whether you’re ready or not, the transition is less than three months away – and in the end, I believe it will be worth all the grief.” Now we’re less than 2 months away. I’m still not sure it’s worth the switch or not, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s happening either way. I guess I’ve reached stage 5.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

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