Clinical Documentation

The Medical Bill Mystery

By Elisabeth Rosenthal for The New York Times I CONFESS I filed this column several weeks late in large part because I had hoped first to figure out a medical bill whose serial iterations have been arriving monthly like clockwork for half a year. As medical bills go, it’s not very big: $225, from a…

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Technologies to Support Clinical Documentation Improvement

By Dr. Jonathan Elion, MD, FACC for HealthTECH Zone The Photographic Painting The value of a new technology is often not understood for many years after its invention. The first film cameras (remember those?) were initially used to capture landscapes, still life studies and portraits. In that regard, they were acting as a “photographic painting”,…

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EHRs Increasingly Included in Medical Malpractice Lawsuits

Source: iHealthBeat Electronic health records are increasingly being cited in medical malpractice lawsuits, Politico reports. According to a review of data by the Doctors Company, a physician-owned medical malpractice insurer, EHRs were involved in just 1% of a sample of lawsuits that had been closed between 2007 and 2013. However, the frequency of such EHR-related…

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Two Dirty Little Secrets About Electronic Health Records

By Larry Husten for Forbes Here are two dirty little secrets about electronic health records (EHR). Just about everyone in the field already knows these secrets, and many are quietly horrified, but few want to discuss them since there are no obvious or easy solutions. EHRs Are a Threat to Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom…

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Medicare tweaks quality and safety programs in hospital payment rule

By Sabriya Rice for Modern Healthcare The CMS floated a slate of tweaks to Medicare’s quality- and safety-reporting requirements in its sweeping proposed rule for 2016 inpatient hospital rates issued last week. Within the 1,500-page draft rule for the Hospital Inpatient Prospective Payment Systems, the CMS outlines changes coming down the pike for the hospital…

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WEDI: ICD-10 Delay Hurt Health Care Industry’s Preparedness

By iHealthBeat The ICD-10 implementation delay has negatively affected stakeholders’ progress preparing for the new code sets, according to a survey by the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange, Healthcare IT News reports (McCann, Healthcare IT News, 4/6). Background U.S. health care organizations are working to transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 code sets by Oct. 1…

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Health Data Breaches: 29 Million U.S. Records Exposed in Four Years

By NBC News More than 29 million U.S. health records were compromised in data breaches between 2010 and 2013, according to a study published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The researchers from Kaiser Permanente and Stanford University used a government database to study 949 data breaches during that four-year…

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Exploring the Ethics of Value-Based Purchasing

By Philip Nathanson for VBP monitor The ethics of value-based purchasing (VBP) seem straightforward enough, don’t they? A purchaser of healthcare ties compensation to how providers perform on various measurable aspects of the triple aim. Who could have an ethical problem about rewarding providers for better population outcomes, or enhanced patient satisfaction, or more cost-effective…

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