The topic of every conversation in healthcare organizations far and wide is the delay in the ICD-10 implementation. The pro-ICD-10 crowd insists ICD-10 should not be delayed, and their voices are getting louder.

This familiar topic was brought up in the article in Health Leaders Media titled, “ICD-10 Proponents Cry Foul.” Their main concern is the vast financial investment so many organizations have in this process. To delay it at this point makes it difficult to foresee a return on investment.

The ICD-10 classification system contains approximately five times the number of diagnostic codes as ICD-9, which allows for greater specificity in describing medical diagnoses and procedures. Access Innovations is the developer of the M.A.I. machine-assisted indexing system and specialists in complex coding, tagging, and indexing. The company provides a range of services that deliver tag integrity. Access Innovations provides training to a client’s staff and then offers quality assurance and validation services that can help an organization:

  • 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.

Many widely used tagging systems lack a user-friendly interface and may not implement a rigorous ANSI-compliant coding subsystem. Access Innovations’ solutions are ANSI compliant and implement state-of-the-art technology to speed tagging and reduce errors.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.