It's September-time to hit the books again and get back to school. If you're an aspiring HIM professional, that means learning about medical record retention.
Retain. Train. Assess. Investigate. Analyze. HIM professionals have undoubtedly come across action verbs like these since HHS announced on January 15, 2009, the final regulation to replace the ICD-9-CM code set with the more advanced ICD-10-CM code set currently used in other nations.
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.
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.
The question today for healthcare facilities isn't, "Does your facility use social media?" It's more like, "Who is using social media, for what purpose, and what are your hospital's policies and procedures around it?" It's good to have a strong social media policy and procedure in place for your organization, says Phyllis A. Patrick, MBA, FACHE, CHC, president of Phyllis A. Patrick & Associates, LLC, in Purchase, N.Y. She developed this accompanying checklist for those looking to beef up their policies on social media use in the hospital setting.
