ICD-10 & Coding
The healthcare industry might not yet realize this simple fact: Although this does not garner much in the way of media attention, ICD-10 promises to improve the business of healthcare in numerous ways.
Katie Carolan, director of operations at Baltimore-based Health Record Services (HRS), spends a lot of time giving presentations at state American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) shows and talking to her own clients about the looming switch to ICD-10. How prepared are people to meet the October 2013 deadline?
McKesson presented three common ICD-10 misconceptions, and what the firm considers to be the truth opposing each.
Virtually all technologies and processes in a hospital will be affected by the conversion of the nation's disease code sets from ICD-9 to ICD-10, Cynthia Grant, director of Courtyard Group, told a roomful of anxious CIOs. "If you think this will be a software update, think again," she said.
Allocating resources, financial and otherwise, for ICD-10 is certain to be a complex, multi-layered and ongoing achievement. The range of software applications and personnel has garnered much attention thus far, but hardware will cost healthcare organizations, too - and that's not just servers.
Plenty of folks said this would be coming and now it has begun - computer-assisted coding tools started rolling toward ICD-10 in the form of one acquisition, a trio of partnerships, and a new tool. Hardly the first such CAC wares to support ICD-10 but, taken together, they represent a collective wave of what's to come.
The Vocabulary Task Force of the HIT Standards Committee is hard at work specifying the vocabularies and codesets that should be publicly available to accelerate certification and meaningful use efforts.
The AAPC (American Academy of Professional Coders) kicked off its “ICD-10 Will Change Everything” campaign in late summer, replete with tools, training, and a virtual floor plan displaying how every corner of a physicians practice will feel the impact.
Recently the ECRI Institute announced that it had added 4,000 new terms to the Universal Medical Device Nomenclature System, bringing the total to 24,544; many more, it said, were in the works.
Bonnie Cassidy, vice president of HIM product management at Reston, Va.-based QuadraMed and the president-elect of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), sat down with Healthcare IT News at AHIMA's 82nd annual convention and exhibit to talk about the importance of the health information management profession, and her vision for the future.