Many are concerned about the financial burden that the ICD-10 implementation might create for healthcare providers. However, there are some ways the physicians can improve the clinical documentation and therefore the coding reimbursements. Being creatures of habit, they have tended to rely on memorized codes. If the reliance on memorization is minimized, reimbursements can improve. There are more anatomically specific codes in the new system, and that makes memorization even more difficult.
This topic was inspired by Becker’s ASC Review and their article, “4 Ways Physician Involvement Will Improve ICD-10 Implementation.” Medical coding requires specialized expertise and systems tailored to the regulatory requirements in which healthcare 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.
