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By by Trey La Charité, MD, FACP, SFHM, CCDS for ACDIS CDI Blog People are human. This goes for clinicians, coders, and for CDI personnel. Mistakes happen. If left unchecked, however, mistakes become habits. Effective CDI programs understand this and take appropriate steps to ensure occasional mistakes don’t become recurring bad habits. Since the structure and…
By Cheryl Ericson, MS, RN, CCDS, CDIP for For the Record When discrepancies occur, the ensuing reconciliation process serves as a prime opportunity to educate CDI and coding staffs. Reconciliation rates monitor both clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and coding proficiency, a key performance indicator. However, many in leadership positions overlook the importance of trending reconciliation…
By Sheila Duhon, MBA, RN, CCDS, A-CCRN, CCS for ACDIS Blog It’s often a challenge for CDI specialists to obtain precise documentation of anemia in the medical record. A hospitalist once asked me why I sent him a query for anemia because since he would treat it the same way no matter what, he wanted…
By Angie Stewart for Becker’s ASC Review Insurers may wrongly deny a claim and hope providers don’t notice it’s actually a covered service, according to medical coding and billing specialist Steven Verno. Mr. Verno shared the following tip for appealing a non-covered service on LinkedIn: “You need proof that the insurance company is wrong. The…
By Tom Sullivan for Healthcare IT News AI is already having a big impact, but strategic planning is not keeping pace and healthcare organizations need to be proactive about developing tools now. Healthcare executives expect artificial intelligence to be among the most impactful technologies fueling innovation, but few are crafting strategies to advance emerging AI…
By Atul Gawande for The New Yorker On a sunny afternoon in May, 2015, I joined a dozen other surgeons at a downtown Boston office building to begin sixteen hours of mandatory computer training. We sat in three rows, each of us parked behind a desktop computer. In one month, our daily routines would come…
By Tracy Boldt, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, and Ellen Jantzer, RN, MSN, CCDS, CCS, CRC for ACDIS Blog The rules of compliant query practice do not change based on the setting. We must consider query construction and wording of provider communication with the same eye for compliance as we have traditionally done in the inpatient…
By the Economist AFTER a brain aneurysm in 2004, Mary McClinton was admitted to Virginia Mason Medical Centre in Seattle. Preparing for an x-ray, the 69-year-old was injected not, as she should have been, with a dye that highlights blood vessels, but with chlorhexidine, an antiseptic. Both are colourless liquids. The dye is harmless; the…
By Jackie Drees for Becker’s Hospital Review Vishal Bhatia, MD, chief medical information officer at RCCH HealthCare Partners in Brentwood, Tenn., discusses the evolution of his role as CMIO and how artificial intelligence, natural language processing and voice recognition technologies can improve healthcare. Responses are lightly edited for clarity and length. Question: How has your role…
With its proposed changes to payments and documentation for office visits, the agency is effectively forcing providers to reckon with a longstanding, oft-disputed problem. By Tony Abraham for Healthcare Dive Most healthcare players agree the evaluation and management billing codes used by CMS need an overhaul, but few like the manner to do so proposed…