Starting October 2012, Medicare will begin paying hospitals for quality measures, according to a CMS fact sheet released April 29. The new Hospital Value-Based Purchasing (VBP) program adopts performance measures under two “domains”:
In room 34 of the emergency department (ED) at Healthytown Municipal Hospital, a morbidly obese woman breathes with the aid of a face mask. A CDI specialist walks by and notices how the woman’s abdomen, not just her chest, rises and falls and decides to take a look at what the physician has...Read More »
Editor’s note: The following timeline contains step-by-step guidance for meeting the ICD-10 go-live date of October 1, 2013, collected and approved by the ACDIS advisory board. It includes material from the “AHIMA ICD- 10-CM/PCS Transition: Planning and Preparation Checklist.” It can be...Read More »
Imagine sitting down to take an exam and the teacher tells you exactly what’s on the test. Not only that, but the teacher’s putting the answers up on the blackboard. PEPPER is a lot like that. It outlines areas that are at risk for payment errors (referred to in the report as “target areas”)...Read More »
(See p. 4) ACDIS has issued comments to AHIMA, CMS, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but it’s largely been a shared responsibility and not the purview of a committee chair or elected officer, for example. We’ve also been asked to take a look at our elections process and ways...Read More »
Q: Are there any coding guidelines/definitions regarding code 518.5 (Pulmonary insufficiency following trauma and surgery) vs. the use of 518.81 (Acute respiratory failure postop)? If a physician documents postop respiratory failure, which code should we report? I looked in Coding Clinic...Read More »
CDI specialists should know what to look for when reviewing cancer admissions in order to capture the true severity of these patients’ illnesses. Often patients are discharged with the diagnosis of “possible” or “probable” cancer when the pathology report is...Read More »