ICD-10 (International Classification of Diseases version 10 developed by the World Health Organization or WHO) code set has the potential to bring new analytical capability to pharmaceutical and medical device…
Does your organization have Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that use ICD-9 CM diagnosis or ICD-9 procedure code information? If so, those procedures and systems need to be evaluated as part of the ICD-10 Impact Assessment.
EMR Certification (also called EHR certification) of electronic medical records or electronic health records is required for any vendor to be listed in the ONC Certified HIT Product List. We provide assistance on the certification process.
If The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is repealed it will be interesting to see if it is repealed in whole or in part. The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) may excise the individual mandate requiring health insurance coverage, or it could strike it down entirely.
The HITECH Act provides incentives for Medicare and Medicaid providers to achieve Meaningful Use of Electronic Medical Records. Meaningful Use Assessment should include these phases and components:
One of the key questions will be how the EMR provides a foundation with the Health Information Exchanges (HIEs) for comparative effectiveness data over the life span of a patient (sometimes called the continuum of care) and whether CDA standards currently proposed will accomplish that. Informatics people call this "longitudinal clinical data."
Look for a balanced approach between EMR vendor, other systems, and an integration strategy that is vendor neutral, enabling all impacted systems to work together to assist in the ICD-10 transition.
Health care providers should ensure that the EMR vendor is on track toward ICD-10 compliance, however they should not rely on their EMR vendor as the panacea. Most hospital systems we work with have many more ancillary systems in radiology, etc. that are also impacted, and the EMR isn't the core system of record (yet) for everything that goes on in a hospital.
We find that most analytics and revenue cycle companies are ignoring the future role coordinated medical coding will have, the transition to ICD-10, and the clinical documentation and processes on the revenue cycle. The ICD-10 transition will re-write the book on revenue cycle management (RCM). RAC audits and Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) will be subject to a new paradigm with ICD-10.
Electronic Health Records (EHR) or Electronic Medical Records (EMR) integration approaches depend on the strategy and priority in exchanging patient information between various healthcare applications, and the standards available:
ICD-10 implementations have competition for resources within hospitals. According to HIMSS Analytics, Stage seven healthcare organizations support the true sharing and use of patient data that ultimately improves process performance, quality…
The recent passage of national health care reform legislation is an important milestone in the process of moving toward providing millions of Americans with access to health insurance. However, significant…