It should come as no surprise that medical record documentation made the list for top standards noncompliance for the first half of 2010. Our old favorites just won’t go away.
MRB recently asked several advisory board members for crucial tips that new HIM managers and directors should know as they learn their way around their job and department.
The Office of the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology (ONC) approved the Chicago-based Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT) and the Drummond Group, Inc. (DGI) of Austin, TX, as the first official certifiers of EHR technology in late summer 2010. In late September, ONC also approved InfoGard Laboratories, Inc., in San Luis Obispo, CA. Now that ONC has named at least three authorized testing and certification bodies (ATCB), healthcare vendors can seek certification for their EHR systems and technologies, and providers can begin to look for certified products in the marketplace. Providers must use certified EHR technology to qualify for meaningful use incentive payments.
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.
