US Congressional offices informed the ICD-10 Coalition that physicians have been calling in concerned that the increased specificity in the ICD-10-CM codes will lead to an increase in recovery audit contractor (RAC) audits.
Read More
John Halamka MD – I’m in Washington today for the HIT Standards Committee and I will post the usual summary of the meeting this evening. However, I wanted to post a morning preview of the opening comments I’ll make a the meeting. We are in a time of great turmoil in healthcare IT policy making.
By Matt Fisher – A practical guide for the governing boards of healthcare organizations was recently released through the joint effort of the Office of the Inspector General (“OIG”) of the Department of Health and Human Services, the American Health Lawyers Associated, the Association of Healthcare Internal Auditors and the Health Care Compliance Association.
By William Hersh MD – Being concerned with representation of information and knowledge, researchers in informatics sometimes express concern with the concept of “semantic drift,” where the meaning of words and concepts changes over time.
By Karen DeSalvo – I am optimistic about the bright future we have to leverage health information technology to enable better health for everyone in this country. One year ago, we called upon the health IT community to move beyond adoption and focus on interoperability, on unlocking the data, so it can be put to the many important uses demanded by consumers, doctors, hospitals, payers, and others who are part of the learning health system.
By William Hyman – Draft legislation in the House related to the regulation of Clinical Decision Support software has been revived for 2015 as a component of the proposed Cures Act.
By John Halamka MD – The first part of this week I have been in China – Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Xuzhou as part of a Harvard Medical School program to help the Chinese create a learning healthcare system while they build 1000 new hospitals and train 300,000 new primary care givers.
By Matt Fisher – Another HIPAA breach settlement announcement and another lesson from the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”). Cornell Prescription Pharmacy (“Cornell”) is a single location pharmacy located in Colorado that will pay OCR $125,000 to resolve allegations of a variety of HIPAA violations. When the facts of the circumstances are described, it will likely raise questions as to why the settlement was so low.
By John Smithwick – Lately, there’s been a lot of noise around the use of big data in health care. As the name implies, big data looks for patterns and trends in extremely large sets of information. And it’s big business.