(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 »
You’ve heard it in the media: Hospitals are making people sick and/or causing unnecessary complications. While the problem is much more complex—often a clash of clinical terminology vs. documentation and coding regulations—hospitals are stuck in the middle and come out looking like an easy-to-...Read More »
As of January 1, a dozen ACDIS advisory board members will step down after leading the organization they helped create three years ago.This diverse group infused the association with a wide breadth of expertise and also reinforced the fact that CDI is not limited to nursing or HIM professionals...Read More »
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 »
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 »
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 »
