ICD-10

ICD-10 hops Congressional hurdle

By Tom Sullivan, Editor-in-Chief, for Healthcare IT News Congress will have just 17 week days to pass legislation killing the conversion. Is ICD-10 finally in the clear? Health IT professionals and policy wonks sleeping with one eye open while watching Capitol Hill for clues about ICD-10’s fate can rest easy – at least for now.…

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Washington Debrief: Flex-IT Bill Makes Series of Meaningful Use Program Changes

By Leslie Kriegstein, Interim Vice President of Public Policy, CHIME for Healthcare Informatics Congressional Affairs Flex-IT Bill Makes Series of Meaningful Use Program Changes Key Takeaway: Congresswoman Renee Ellmers (R-NC-02) introduced legislation last week that makes a series of substantial improvements to the Meaningful Use Program, including a delay in the release Stage 3 rules.…

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ICD-10’s five stages of grief

By Hannah Galvin, MD for Healthcare IT News As ICD-10 draws closer, you may feel like you’re stuck in one of the five stages of grief: Denial: “ICD-what? Excuse me, I have patients to see.” Anger: “I don’t have time for ICD-10! The government obviously doesn’t understand the practice of medicine. Why would anyone ever…

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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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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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