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CMS Eases Meaningful Use Requirements in Proposed Rule

Article by Mary Butler. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on July 12, 2016 and is republished here with permission. A new proposed rule would reduce the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ (CMS) “meaningful use” EHR Incentive Program reporting period for clinicians, hospitals, and critical access hospitals. The new reporting period would…

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Survey: Coding Productivity Dipped After ICD-10 Implementation

Article by Mary Butler. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on June 13, 2016 and is republished here with permission. The implementation of ICD-10 did result in a perceived loss of coding productivity, with a minimal dip in coding accuracy, according to a recent coding productivity and accuracy survey. The survey was…

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4 Stolen Health Databases Reportedly for Sale on Dark Web

Hacker Takes Credit for Theft of Data on Nearly 10 Million Patients By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee for Data Breach Today A hacker is reportedly selling on the dark web copies of databases stolen from three unidentified U.S. healthcare organizations and one unnamed health insurer containing data on nearly 10 million individuals for prices ranging from…

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CDI is Expanding as Need for Quality Documentation Grows

Article by Tammy Combs. This article was originally published on the Journal of AHIMA website on June 23, 2016 and is republished here with permission. Clinical documentation improvement (CDI) programs are quickly emerging in various areas of the healthcare arena. We now see these programs specializing both prior to and beyond the acute hospital admission. Just as…

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Why Electronic Medical Records Are Not Patient-Centric

By Laurence Chu, MD, FACS for Forbes Current information technology is lacking an efficient and comprehensive solution to everyday care for the healthcare provider and patient. For many physicians, there is a forced acceptance of the electronic medical record (EMR). Providers have choices from EMR vendors like athenahealth, Cerner CERN, eClinicalWorks, Epic , General Electric’s…

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Unfinished Business

By Susan Chapman for For The Record Findings from The Joint Commission show many surveyed hospitals house incomplete medical records. When so many aspects of health care revolve around quality documentation, it would be good to know that providers are accomplished medical record custodians. Depending on your perspective, the news on that front isn’t half…

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Respiratory Therapist Convicted in HIPAA Criminal Case

Prosecutors Alleged Patient Information Used to Seek Drugs By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee for Healthcare Info Security In a rare criminal case involving a HIPAA violation, a federal jury in Ohio has convicted a former respiratory therapist of wrongly obtaining individually identifiable health information. Prosecutors claimed the therapist was using the information for seeking, obtaining or…

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DEA Wants Inside Your Medical Records to Fight the War on Drugs

By Christopher Moraff for The Daily Beast The feds are fighting to look at millions of private files without a warrant, including those of two transgender men who are taking testosterone. Marlon Jones was arrested for taking legal painkillers, prescribed to him by a doctor, after a double knee replacement. Jones, an assistant fire chief of Utah’s…

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MACRA, MIPS: Slated to Make an M-pressive Impact

By Mike Bassett for For The Record, Vol. 28 No. 5 P. 16 With the announcement of the proposed rule, the M&M acronyms are quickly becoming top of mind for health care executives. In the long tradition of producing acronyms at a frightening pace, the health care industry has succeeded in producing two more that are rolling…

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Thousands Of NFL Players’ Medical Records Stolen From Skins Trainer

By Barry Petchesky for DEADSPIN In late April, the NFL recently informed its players, a Skins athletic trainer’s car was broken into. The thief took a backpack, and inside that backpack was a cache of electronic and paper medical records for thousands of players, including NFL Combine attendees from the last 13 years. That would…

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