Present-on-admission (POA) indicators, hospital-acquired conditions (HAC), and never events have been around for a while. However, they still seem to cause compliance conundrums, says Shannon McCall, RHIA, CCS, CCS-P, CPC, CPC-I, CCDS, director of HIM and coding at HCPro, Inc., in Marblehead, MA.
Now that fall is in the air, hospitals may feel a chill as Medicare implements the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) through the 2011 inpatient prospective payment system. Aspects include:
The transition to ICD-10 is not in any way the kind of transition we made from ICD-8 to ICD-9, nor is it a simple matter of training coders and installing a new encoder.
RACs are looking at excisional debridement coding, and it’s no wonder. There are plenty of potential traps for coders reporting these inpatient procedures.
