by Trey La Charité, MD, FACP, SFHM, CCS, CCDS
Unfortunately, I have heard horror stories through the years where a hospital’s CDI specialists do not see eye-to-eye with their colleagues in coding; sometimes, though rarely, I’ve even heard of open hostility between these two...Read More »
By Candace Blankenship, BSN, RN, CCDS
Sometimes I have a dream where every physician has completely and accurately documented the condition of congestive heart failure (CHF) in every record I review.
Then my alarm clock goes off. It’s time for me to get up, get dressed, go...Read More »
By Sharme Brodie, RN, CCDS
The year’s final AHA Coding Clinic for ICD-10-CM/PCS for 2017 includes 114 pages—similar to the page count for the final quarter of 2016. Needless to say, it contains a lot of information.
Let’s start the ball rolling by discussing the...Read More »
The 2017 Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC) guidelines to be published in the March 2017 issue of Critical Care Medicine have adopted the 2016 Sepsis-3 definition of...Read More »
Intensive care units are expensive, invasive, and supposed to be reserved for the sickest hospital patients, but more than half the time, they're not needed, according to research from LA BioMed and UCLA,...Read More »
The 2017 updates to ICD-10-CM included many additions to the digestive system diagnoses, especially with codes for pancreatitis and intestinal infections. The codes largely focus on the lower gastrointestinal (GI) tract, according to an article published in...Read More »
by James S. Kennedy, MD, CCS, CDIP
Over the years there’s been a tsunami of denials from payers, Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC), and Medicare quality improvement organizations. This is due to the auditors’ removal of ICD-10-CM codes based on provider documentation; auditors can...Read More »
By Sharme Brodie, RN, CCDS
Another issue of AHA’s Coding Clinic is out, and much of the information in the newest release pertains to the coding of interventions or procedures. There are, however, a few questions and answers found in Coding Clinic, Third Quarter 2017,...Read More »
