National healthcare entities are teaming up and speaking out on how to make healthcare better. EDITOR’S NOTE: The following was discussed by Nachimson during last Tuesday’s Talk Ten Tuesdays live broadcast. There are two major and complementary rules to advance interoperability being proposed by U.S. Department of Health and Human…

Is the healthcare industry tone deaf to physicians’ complaints? The Physicians Foundation 2018 Physician Survey, published on Sept. 18, 2018, features opinions of our nation’s physicians—opinions that are sobering and should sound a loud wake-up call.  When distilled down to the very essence of the report, the “fixes” for our…

CMS and ONC get serious about interoperability during HIMSS.During the HIMSS 19 conference in Orlando last week, the heads of the Office of the National Coordinator (ONC) for Health Information Technology and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) took extraordinary steps by discussing the content of two proposed…

Interoperability is seen as the first step to using data for health improvement. I expect that 2019 will be the “Year of Interoperability”.  The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), through its hospital and physician incentive programs, is asking providers to have their electronic health records (EHRs) capable of…

How healthcare providers can best prepare for the worst. Editor’s Note: The following is a transcript of a recent segment on Talk Ten Tuesdays by Julie Dooling, speaking on challenges and tips for healthcare organizations in the face of a natural disaster. Collectively, we continue to learn from experiences where…

Two recent studies report on the alarming rate of physician burnout. EDITOR’S NOTE: Physician burnout, a topic of great interest across the healthcare industry during recent years, continues to make headlines.Talk Ten Tuesday host and ICD10monitor Publisher Chuck Buck and renowned psychiatrist H. Steven Moffic, MD discuss the topic. What follows is…

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (or questioning) (LGBTQ) population faces barriers to appropriate healthcare access. EDITOR’S NOTE: The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has developed a practice brief on this issue, and ICD10monitor will continue to report on how recognition of this vulnerable population is being demonstrated…

The aftermath of Florence prompts a review of emergency preparedness We know the 2018 hurricane season is upon us, but we are always unsure of where the individual storms will appear, what their track will be, and how they will behave. Hurricane Florence—since downgraded to a tropic depression— has been…

New code changes number 335. The new current procedural terminology (CPT®) codes have been released with 335 code changes in 2019.  There were many code revisions with guideline, description and instructional note changes.   Let’s look at the highlights of many new CPT codes for 2019. There six new codes in the…

Trends in Clinical Documentation, Past, Present, and Future – Part I For nearly a century, since Grace W. Myers of Massachusetts General Hospital became the first medical records librarian in the early 1900s and the American College of Surgeons (ACOS) sought to improve the standards of medical records being created…