HIM Briefings

Time is of the essence. With less than a year until the ICD-10 deadline, there are many items that organizations need to cross off their checklists as we get ready to go live. Unfortunately, organizations aren't all in the same place when it comes to ICD-10 readiness.

Imagine a hospital as a sentient being that holds within it all things necessary to heal you from illness or injury. The HIM department, or medical records department, is this being's memory. Without it, there would be no continuum of patient care. Sometimes, it's the hospital's memory that serves to produce an otherwise overlooked diagnosis.

This article is based on the results of MRB's quarterly benchmark survey. This month, we chose to survey respondents on EHR implementation and challenges.

So what's it like from the HIM professor's point of view? We catch up with 37-year professor Anita Hazelwood, RHIA, FAHIMA, program director of HIM at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

The July 2013 MRB article I wrote discussed the importance of competency and skills testing in the workplace relative to new and evolving roles in the HIM department. In this issue, we discuss "not ­knowing what you don't know." In other words, there is a significant knowledge gap about the importance of EDMS in EHRs.

Eligible professionals (EP), eligible hospitals, and critical access hospitals (CAH) that cannot demonstrate meaningful use of EHRs could soon face Medicare payment adjustments. But CMS has an important message for providers: There's still time to prove meaningful use and avoid adjustments.

It's a brave new world out there for business ­associates (BA). BAs needed to comply with the HIPAA Security Rule and the use and disclosure provisions of the Privacy Rule in February 2010 as a result of the ­HITECH Act. However, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) held off on any enforcement activities-that is, until recently.

Also known as the "mega rules," the omnibus final rules are clarifications and finalizations of the HIPAA rules of 2003, the HITECH rules of 2008, and the incorporation of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA) rules into the Privacy and ­Security rules. These are not sweeping changes, as many ­describe, but clarifications. In most cases, what are now final rules are best practices that organizations should already be following.