The newness and specificity of ICD-10 has ushered in a stronger focus on clinical coding audits. From internal reviews to external inpatient coding audits, healthcare organizations nationwide are revisiting tried-and-true audit practices with ICD-10 coding quality in mind.
If you have never participated in the ICD-10 Coordination and Maintenance proceedings, I highly suggest that you make it a goal for the future. I feel very maternal about some of the changes in ICD-10-CM which will be implemented October 1 because I participated in the formative meeting.
Now that the fiscal year (FY) 2018 IPPS Final Rule , the 2018 ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting , and Coding Clinic , Third Quarter 2017, have been released, let’s continue to process some interesting dynamics that warrant our consideration in documentation and coding compliance.
Appeal writing, like most things in a hospital, is a learned skill. Keeping things simple, both in terms of the arguments constructed and the language used in the letters themselves, will prevent you from creating horrific monstrosities out of minor gremlins.
In August, CMS released the fiscal year (FY) 2018 IPPS final rule which featured updates to various quality initiatives, annual payment updates for inpatient services, and an extensive amount of now-annual ICD-10-PCS code additions, deletions, and revisions.
You may be thinking that you’ve never heard of scleroderma. As a coder, we know to look at these big fancy words and break them down by their root words in order to get a clue of what we’re talking about.
One of the reasons that we all read Briefings in Coding Compliance Strategies is to maintain our competence and quality in coding and risk-adjustment principles as to anticipate how recovery auditors and accountability agents view our coded data. While a good compliance officer and attorney knows the law, the better one knows the law, the judge, and the jury.
The fiscal year (FY) 2018 IPPS final rule includes updates to payment rates and quality initiatives, but some of the most extensive changes pertain to MS-DRG classifications and relative weights.
CMS recently released the fiscal year (FY) 2018 IPPS final rule which featured updates to various quality initiatives, along with annual payment updates for inpatient services.