This is not a time to be subtle. That is what Stephen M. Stewart, CIO of Iowa-based Henry County Health Center, writes in Hospitals & Health Networks, this week. Steward was referring to the importance of impending ICD-10 classification transition.
Fierce Health IT brought this topic to our attention in their article, “CIOs: Don’t understate the importance of ICD-10 to your staff.” Steward shared a reference from a nurse who said “If you want us nurses to get it, you have to ride the halls like Paul Revere and keep reminding us that the British are coming….We are so involved with our patients that we have a hard time seeing what is coming at us.”
With a deadline of October 2013, it is time to start ringing the bells and alerting the staff. Medical coding requires specialized expertise and systems tailored to the regulatory requirements in which health care providers, hospitals, and doctors deliver their services. Training is very important. That is why Access Innovations, Inc. provides training to a client’s staff and then offers quality assurance and validation services that can:
- Minimize the risk of a coding error
- Identify inappropriate or inadvertently applied tags
- Display a “map” of coding distributions to allow management to get a bird’s-eye view of the coding assignment flow.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
