If we look at each element of a coding audit, we can see the benefits these coding reviews provide. Every healthcare organization and hospital should invest in routine, internal coding audits. The alternative is waiting until the payer conducts an audit, denies a claim, and incurs costs for the organization.
In 2013 the “ Guidelines for Achieving a Compliant Query Practice ,” a collaboration between AHIMA and ACDIS, was published. It has served as the industry guideline for the establishment of best practices surrounding queries. Since that time this brief has been updated twice: once in 2016 and most recently in 2019 .
As an inherited blood disorder, sickle cell disease is passed from parent to child. Children with sickle cell disease often have two defective hemoglobin S genes , one from each parent. However, various forms of sickle cell disorder also occur when a person inherits one hemoglobin S gene (sickle cell gene) from one parent and a different type (other than the S type) of defective hemoglobin gene from the other parent. All of these forms have distinct ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes, making reporting complex.
Consider the story of a patient—say, a pneumonia patient—whose treatment cost a lot of money. The hospital’s reimbursement for that care, however, was less than the cost of providing it. Now say someone looked at that case and how complex it was, and then saw that the reimbursement only paid for half the cost of caring for that patient. That’s how CDI was born.
Rules governing code assignment often don’t make sense to those coming from the clinical side, such as CDI. In truth, they often confound professionals with years of inpatient coding experience, too. And most CDI and coding professionals have a list of frustrations when it comes to translating clinical documentation into ICD-10 codes.
Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form of dementia, with symptoms that include problems with memory, thinking, and behavior. Understanding Alzheimer’s disease and its symptoms is important to coders, as some of the entries in the ICD-10-CM Alphabetic Index can be confusing.
It is evident with the complexity of this diagnosis (and the complexity of updated criteria) that even the most seasoned inpatient coder should review malnutrition coding guidelines and criteria frequently to ensure compliant reporting.
The brain is the most complex component of the central nervous system, consisting of approximately 100 billion neurons that communicate via an exponentially larger number of synapses. Individual areas of the brain have specialized functions that work in conjunction and regulate voluntary and involuntary body functions.
