A recent survey by Edifecs reports that about two-thirds of health care professionals do not believe a delay in ICD-10 implementation will improve readiness for the new coding standards. This is disheartening, considering that U.S. health care organizations are working to transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets to accommodate codes for new diseases and procedures. The switch from about 14,000 codes to about 69,000 codes was supposed to be done by October 1, 2013.

We found this interesting report on iHealth Beat in their article, “Deadline Delay Would Not Improve ICD-10 Readiness, Survey Finds.” Medical coding requires specialized expertise and systems tailored to the regulatory requirements in which health care providers, hospitals, and doctors deliver their services.

Access Innovations, developer of the M.A.I. machine-assisted indexing system and specialists in complex coding, tagging, and indexing, 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:

  • 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 the 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. For more information, contact Access Innovations.

Melody K. Smith

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