Information received by TMF Quality Institute during the past year indicates that 61% of hospitals use PEPPER data to guide their auditing process and help them focus on areas of potential vulnerability.
Cross-training coders has definitive short-term advantages, such as enhancing staff coverage during holidays and vacations and increasing the department's ability to handle periods of fluctuation in certain bill types, but these aren't the only benefits.
Whether you work in a dedicated children’s hospital or a general hospital with a pediatric service line, you will likely come into contact with coding charts of kids. Sometimes they are easy (e.g., an inguinal hernia repair without obstruction or gangrene is an inguinal hernia repair without obstruction or gangrene—except it has to be identified as right or left in ICD-10). Sometimes they are not so easy (e.g., complex congenital diseases and their manifestations and complications).
Each physician may have his or her own way of describing a stroke. However, consistent terminology leads to accurate data to describe the care provided as well as the mortality, length of stay, and cost statistics.
Although ICD-10-CM resolves some problematic areas of coding, it isn't a panacea. Respiratory insufficiency is one diagnosis that will continue to challenge coders.
