HIM Briefings

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.

Cheshire Medical Center/Dartmouth-Hitchcock Keene (N.H.), like many others, pays close attention to documentation issues around coding.

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.

Summers can be wonderful, it's true. But they can ­also be a glowing reminder of what you don't have in your HIM department: a bountiful staff and endless resources.

For HIM professionals who took our annual salary survey, it's been a "Yes, but …" kind of year.

EHR security-that's an IT thing, right? Sure it is.

A presumption is a belief or hypothesis about something. An assumption is taking a piece of information (as in knowledge about a topic) as a given fact. When you put them together, a presumptive ­assumption is troublesome because you can assume in error.

Test staff knowledge of HIPAA with these questions:

Meaningful use, ICD-10, Recovery Auditors, survey and more surveys-what next? Healthcare is never dull!