More than one-third of Americans are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These individuals typically have a higher risk of numerous health conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain types of cancer-conditions that can all lead to higher rates of complications and readmissions.
Betty B. Bibbins has a message for any healthcare professional-including HIM managers and directors-who struggles to get physicians to document with enough specificity to produce compliant coding and billing: It's your job to tell them how to do it better.
If HIM professionals needed another reason to be concerned with protected health information (PHI) outside of paper records, a surgery center in Arizona provided one in April.
