Even experienced and consistently accurate acute care hospital coders may not be familiar with pediatric diseases. Age is not a factor for some conditions (e.g., appendicitis). Others are age-specific or have age-specific diagnosis, healing, and treatment...Read More »
No industry or profession is immune to the budget crunch. Unfortunately, many departments fall into a routine, neglect to assess costs, and fail to look for innovative ways to save money. To address the mounting stresses on its budget, Tufts Medical Center in Boston turned to CNG-ONLINE,
If you’ve started using your PEPPER to help you identify potential issues at your hospital, good for you! In this final entry, I’m going to suggest you take it a step further—identifying charts that may fail for lack of medical...Read More »
Q: Do you recommend carving out time for outpatient [documentation] review, or dedicating someone to this role?
A: We actually carve out time for outpatient review. We started with two initiatives in our ED. One was injections/infusions and documentation...Read More »
In my previous entry, I talked about the PEPPER process and how it can be used to help identify potential issues of errors in coding, billing, or medical necessity that are specific to each hospital. Now I want to review some target...Read More »
My analytical side is always harassing me to get it more involved in what I do. So I decided to dig into our hospital’s PEPPERs. PEPPER is the Program for Evaluating Payment Patterns Electronic Report, issued quarterly. (Calling it a...Read More »
Scenario: You find yourself in the company of a physician you haven’t formally met, but for whom you have left queries (or may in the future). You’re in line behind the doc in the cafeteria or riding the elevator together, and you’re aware this is a great...Read More »
While physician documentation drives our CDI and HIM programs, we nevertheless need the assistance of our facility’s nurses and their nursing documentation. Not only are nursing notes and assessments incredibly helpful in formulating...Read More »
