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By Tom Sullivan for Healthcare IT News Ransomware attacks and tools are on the rise and perhaps more so than has been widely understood thus far. The gist: Hackers crack into a network via malicious URLs or malware, find data they can encrypt with relatively low-cost tools, and then demand either money or Bitcoins to return it.…
By Dr. Jon Elion for ChartWise Medical Systems, Inc. In my blog entry of July 8, 2015, I summarized some of the history of the first international classification of diseases, a process that started in 1853 and was finally approved in 1893. While this was not officially called “ICD-1”, it was in fact the first international…
By Joseph Conn for Modern Healthcare It’s been mostly smooth sailing with a few rough spots one month into the national conversion to the International Classification of Diseases, 10th Revision, of diagnostic and procedural codes, better known as ICD-10. The CMS issued a statement Thursday saying Medicare fee-for-service claims “are processing normally,” with 4.6 million…
Written by Ayla Ellison for Becker’s Hospital CFO CMS released its final 2016 Hospital Outpatient Prospective Payment System and Ambulatory Surgical Center Payment System rule on Friday, which finalizes CMS’ proposal to alter its controversial two-midnight rule and implements previously announced modifications to CMS’ medical review strategy. Here are 10 things to know about the…
Written by Shannon Barnet for Becker’s Infection Control & Clinical Quality The number of hospitals that received an “F” safety grade from Leapfrog increased from 20 in the spring to 34 this fall. The Hospital Safety Score assigns letter grades — A, B, C, D and F — to more than 2,500 hospitals in the…
Sharing documentation best practices is a win-win for healthcare stakeholders. By Bonnie Bakal for Advanced Healthcare for Health Information Professionals One of my all-time favorite song lyrics is from Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up and goes: “I am strong when I am on your shoulders, You raise me up to more than I can…
Written by John Smithwick for Healthcare Intelligence Network Getting patients diagnosed correctly and treated appropriately depends on providers gathering both quantitative data, which is typically structured, and qualitative data, which is typically unstructured. When comparing both types of data, it’s more challenging to manage and derive value from unstructured data. Structured data is that which…
By Akanksha Jayanthi for Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review After three delays and much industry opposition, the United States’ healthcare industry transitioned Oct. 1 to ICD-10, catching up with the latest version of the international classification of diseases codes. The transition has been compared to the Y2K scare at the turn of the millennium,…
By Niam Yaraghi for Brookings While patients may hugely benefit from having access to their own medical records, many hospitals and physicians are still very reluctant to provide patients with a copy of their records. Although taxpayers have partly paid for the majority of hospitals to adopt electronic health records systems, which reduce the cost…
by David Weldon for Healthcare It News For them, the best hope at this point is to bring in an outside firm to handle the effort, experts say. After a number of delays, and much anticipation, the implementation of ICD-10 is finally underway as of Oct. 1. But with all the competition in the job market…