It's December, the end of a long 2012 for you and your HIM staff. Whether you have 50 coders or five, you may be putting the final touches on an end-of-the-year celebration.
One thing is certain. You don't want to wait until you receive a notification letter from OCR before you begin preparing for a HIPAA audit, says Dena Boggan, CPC, CMC, CCP, HIPAA privacy/security officer at St. Dominic Jackson Memorial Hospital in Jackson, Miss.
As increasingly more healthcare providers transition to electronic health records (EHR), the need for secure conversion of paper charts to electronic patient documentation also increases.