With the preparation for the transition to ICD-10, there is a new interest in population management. This most likely comes from the concerns around financial reimbursement after the implementation in October 2014. There will be five times the number of codes after the implementation of the ICD-10 coding classification. This will allow for greater specificity, but there will be a huge learning curve. All this can be overwhelming to medical coders. Government Health IT brought this issue to our attention in their article, “Using ICD-10 in population management for risk stratification.”
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.
