ICD-10 & Coding
When Farzad Mostashari, MD, the national coordinator for health IT, thinks about health information exchange (HIE), he's also thinking about grammar and parts of speech.
Payer performance improvement remained flat in 2011, according to the seventh annual PayerView rankings released today by health IT company athenahealth. That's attributed in part to new compliance measures and major information technology shifts.
The College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME) on Wednesday submitted comments on ICD-10 proposed rulemaking to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. CHIME urged HHS to remain committed to ICD-10, while calling the one-year delay an appropriate "middle ground" for all stakeholders.
Heather Haugen, vice president of research at the Breakaway Group, a Xerox subsidiary, discusses some opportunities created by the ICD-10 delay in terms of clinical documentation and alignment with EHRs, controlling coders' learning curves and addressing anticipated productivity loss following the compliance deadline.
Postponing ICD-10, whenever the new compliance date might end up being, would do little to improve readiness – but could have significant adverse effects and substantial costs, said a majority of respondents to a survey from Edifecs, which develops technologies for regulatory compliance and data exchange.
When it comes to ICD-10 preparedness, payers are well ahead of providers in the quest to be ready for the new coding format by the Oct. 1, 2013 deadline. That news probably doesn’t come as a shock to anyone involved in the process, but it shows that the claim-filing infrastructure should be ready on the receiving end, coding experts say.
When Acting CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner said Feb. 14 that CMS would take another look at the timeline for converting from the ICD-9 billing code set to ICD-10, she unleashed a barrage of response – for and against – across the healthcare industry. The next day Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said HHS, indeed, intended to push back the deadline.
In this video, Karen Farrell, Director of Computer-Assisted Physician Documentation (CAPD) at Nuance Healthcare, gives us a closer look at two Clinical Language Understanding (CLU) products announced at HIMSS12.
The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) have introduced a free online tool, the ICD-10 Critical Pathway for Getting Started -- 2012 and Beyond for use by providers who have not yet begun preparing for ICD-10.
"This is a bit ironic today," Sue Bowman said, pointing to a CMS-borrowed slide stating that the compliance deadline for ICD-10 is October 1, 2013. "The government threw a big curveball toward many presentations."