(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 »
In a meeting Thursday, January 13, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC) recommended Congress provide a 2.5% update with a 1.5% documentation and coding adjustment (DCA) reduction for a net 1% update for fiscal year 2012 inpatient payments, according to a report from ...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 »
At the start of the New Year, CMS released an enhanced Physician Comparesite which “begins to fill an important gap in our online tools by...Read More »
After four years of studying the intricacies of the medical transcription industry, Gary C. David, PhD, associate professor of sociology and associate professor of information design and corporate communication at Bentley University in Waltham, MA, has turned his attention to CDI. David is in...Read More »
Q: Our physician provided an illegible diagnosis of malnutrition, and when we queried him regarding the specific type of malnutrition, he provided protein malnutrition. The ICD-9-CMCoding Manual directs us to assign code 260;...Read More »
