ICD-10 Training: Don’t use GEMs or the WSJ to teach ICD-10 coding
Carl Natale, ICD10 Watch
“It’s probably not too early to get your physicians involved in your ICD-10 transition.
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Coding
ICD-10 Testing: It’s not just for medical coders
Carl Natale, ICD10 Watch
“Healthcare providers shouldn’t underestimate the testing phase of their ICD-10 transition.
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What patients need to know about coding
Brandon Betancourt, KevinMD
“Health insurance is very complicated. At our practice, we deal with health insurance all the time and even for us, it gets to be very complicated sometimes. So it is natural that patients have a hard time understanding it as well.
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Significant [unsung] progress in Australia’s ehealth
Charles Wright, eHealthCentral
“Developers of GP desktop software working on NEHTA’s vendor panel expect the authority to be able to make a series of positive announcements in the early part of next year, as they make steady progress on key elements of the infrastructure needed to launch the nation’s ehealth revolution.
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Medical Coding’s Intent is Sometimes Lost in Translation
Daniel Essin, Physicians Practice
“It means that codes, any codes, do not intrinsically mean anything. Because the number of possible thoughts is infinite and the number of codes is small, no code can even come close to precisely standing for any specific thought. The developers of the original International Classification of Disease (ICD) understood this. They had a specific objective in mind and it was not to assign a specific code to every possible medical diagnosis or procedure.
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Good Things to Say About ICD-10
Changing to ICD-10 diagnosis and procedure coding is a nail-biter for I.T. staff, health information managers, billing departments, and pretty much anyone who has to document anything about patient care.
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VA studies VistA refactoring
David Perera, FierceGovernmentIT
“One of the first actions the Veterans Affairs Department has undertaken since launching in August a central body dubbed the “custodial agent” to oversee open source electronic health record projects is to commission a study on how the code for its EHR system could be refactored, VA Chief Information Officer Roger Baker told reporters Nov. 23.
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Vídeo de la historia clínica electrónica vasca
La bitácora de Fran Sánchez Laguna
“Del interesantísimo debate que se está generando en la entrada “La historia clínica en los tiempos de la sanidad híbrida“, quiero compartir con vosotros un vídeo que nos muestra la HCE vasca que enlazó Alfredo Alday (@alfrealday).
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Problem list guidance in the EHR
Acker B et al, Journal of AHIMA
Problem lists facilitate continuity of patient care by providing a comprehensive and accessible list of patient problems in one place. Problem lists used within health records are a list of illnesses, injuries, and other factors that affect the health of an individual patient, usually identifying the time of occurrence or identification and resolution.1 They are an important communication vehicle used throughout the entire healthcare continuum.
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AHIMA: ICD-11 on horizon, but need to get through ICD-10 first
Bob Mitchell, Cardiovascular Business
“Managing information in the 21st Century and whether to code or not to code was the keynote address presented Oct. 4 at the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) conference by T. Bedirhan Ustun, MD, PhD, team coordinator of classification, terminology and standards in the Department of Health statistics at the World Health Organization (WHO).
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ICD-10-CA: What really went wrong in Canada
Carl Natale, Healthcare IT News
“A benefit of being one of the very few countries in the world to not implement ICD-10 coding yet is that we can learn from how the other countries did it. Canada is one of those countries where we can find lessons.
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Hospital Medical Coding in the Health IT Age
Stuart Kamin, EHR Bloggers
“As the 2013 ICD-10 deadline looms, the need to abstract almost 20,000 diagnosis codes – a complex undertaking already – will soon become a labyrinth of over 150,000 codes. This would be significant enough to make any hospital take notice, without the additional squeeze on reimbursement from the Affordable Care Act. Thus, ICD-10 transition is a delicate undertaking that must be achieved with high precision, for there is no fat to waste in the revenue cycle.
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ICD-10 Implementation: Top concerns for healthcare providers
Carl Natale, ICD10 Watch
“ICD-10 is not a new phenomenon in the world. The World Health Organization endorsed adoption in 1990. But the United States has made it very unique and complicated.
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Characterisation of children’s asthma status by ICD-9 code and criteria-based medical record review
Juhn Y et al, Primary Care Respiratory Journal, 20(1)
OBJECTIVE
To characterise the relationship between ICD code-based (i.e. physician diagnosis-based) and criteria-based asthma ascertainment.
METHODS
We compared identification of children with asthma between criteria-based medical record review for asthma ascertainment and an ICD-9 code-based approach. We determined the agreement rate and validity index of ICD code-based asthma ascertainment using asthma status by medical record review as a gold standard.
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Approaches to enhancing the validity of coded data in electronic medical records
Kalra D, Fernando B. Primary Care Respiratory Journal, 20(1)
In the linked paper entitled “Characterisation of children’s asthma status by ICD-9 code and criteria-based medical record review”, the authors have observed a discrepancy between the presence of clinical features compatible with the diagnosis of asthma in children’s hospital electronic health records and the tagging of the record with a corresponding classification code.
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Transition to ICD-10 codes will be disruptive, but CIOs can help
Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“Like a certain segment of the physician population contemplating retiring early instead of learning electronic health record (EHR) systems by the 2015 federal deadlines, a segment of hospital coders might quit instead of learning ICD-10 codes, which will replace the current ICD-9 codes in the United States on Oct. 1, 2013.
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Re-engineering the Coding Workflow
Coplan-Gould W et al, Journal of AHIMA, 82(7)
Synergism—where total outcome is greater than the sum of individual parts—is fast entering the daily HIM vernacular.
That’s because three forces are coming together to revolutionize the clinical coding function: electronic health records, computer-assisted coding (CAC), and ICD-10-CM/PCS. Taken together these changes will profoundly alter how coding is performed, managed, and integrated into the healthcare delivery system.
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EHR vendors: Watch first, code later
Don Fluckinger, SearchHealthIT
“In the course of interviewing two sources for two different stories, interviewees took me down the same interesting side street, conversationally. They both were convinced the best electronic health record (EHR) applications are built when programmers first shadow a clinician before they design their systems — when the tabula is still rasa. They end up creating a much more common-sense EHR application than those who build their systems first and then get real-world exposure in time for the final tweaks.
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Afstuderende huisartsen vragen efficiënter Elektronisch Medisch Dossier
Datanews
“De meer dan honderd afstuderende Leuvense studenten huisarts roepen in een mededeling alle producenten van het Elektronisch Medisch Dossier (EMD) op werk te maken van een gebruiksvriendelijk systeem om ziektebeelden op gecodeerde wijze te registreren.
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ICD-10 transition proving complex, expensive for hospitals
Ken Terry, FierceHealthIT
“The transition to the ICD-10 diagnostic code set will be expensive and difficult, industry observers agree in a recent Computerworld article. The average hospital will spend between $2 million and $5 million to upgrade and/or replace its systems, and ICD-10 will cost large healthcare organizations upward of $20 million.
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