Lekia Reflection

Electronic health records can lessen the disintegration of care by refining care coordination. The use of electronic health records will deliver providers with accurate information. This is especially important for those that see multiple specialists, and enable a smooth transition between care settings and receive treatment in emergency

Are you and your staff anywhere near ready for ICD-10’s October 1st deadline? Maybe you’ve been overwhelmed just trying to implement all of the other changes happening in healthcare thanks to the Affordable Care Act, EMR mandates, increased Medicare audits, and value-based purchasing penalties; you’ve hardly had time to prepare for this latest coding switch.

An electronic health record (EHR) defines as the permissible patient record created in hospitals that serve as the data source for all health records. It is an electronic version of a paper chart that includes the patient’s medical history, maintained by the provider over time, and may include all of the key administrative clinical data relevant to that persons care. Information that is readily available includes information such as demographics, progress notes, allergies, medications, vital signs, past medical history, immunizations, laboratory data, & radiology reports. The intent of an EHR can be understood as a complete record of patient

ICD-10 is a huge change from ICD-9, the main purpose was to help coders code more specific. One benefit of ICD-10 is to give the doctor an electronic trail of proof for payments from patients, insurance, government, and hospitals. ICD-9 having diagnosis codes ranging from three to five digits but ICD-10 having diagnosis codes ranging from three to seven digits will automatically give you a more detailed code. Using ICD-10 gives you a lesser risk of getting audited. Giving a specific description on claim forms will make it harder to get the wrong code. ICD-10 will improve healthcare, the codes are more detailed making the data and communication flow faster. ICD-10's will help guarantee the physician reputation; the electronic trails are reported

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires all providers to implement ICD-10 coding system begin on October 1st, 2015 so the U.S. healthcare system can communicate in the same language as with other countries’ systems. The transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 had big changes from 14,000 diagnostic codes to more than 68,000 and 4,000 procedure codes to 87,000. The transition affected the reimbursements of hospitals. Medicare requires all patients’ procedures and services to be coded using ICD-10 system while they are charged in CDM using CPT codes. However, there is no direct link between ICD and CPT codes (Jensen, Ward, & Starbuck, 2016). The CDM committee had to work together to prepare for this event. Switching from numerical

The U.S. lags behind in implementing ICD-10 coding because of other healthcare concerns within our healthcare system. I believe that with the passing of the Affordable Care Act and the changes that it brought about, the major focus for healthcare providers was how to survive and adjust to the changes. From a government stand point, the main focus was getting the Act passed and working out all of the bugs within the system used for consumers to sign up for insurance. Due to this ICD-10 was kind of tabled for a later date. This was good for those providers that had not begun to update their systems.

I do agree with you it will have a great dramatic impact in healthcare. If the coding system is not used in a proper way it can affect many system that uses codes. When using ICD-10 yes this will help to be more specific when it comes to coding. Its not going to be very easy but its is going to help and change the way the coding system is being used so there won't be No mistakes. Yes, there is a big different between ICD-9 and ICD-10-CM but it can be also easy to learn it because it the revision to all the codes. I do believe the change is good because it just going to help us use a specific code when diagnoses.

I think one of the biggest challenges transitioning from ICD-9 to ICD-10 will me the amount of codes the ICD-10 book has. I think at first it will be a little hard getting used to but once we get used to it, I think it's going to be fine.

Having the lack of knowledge of the ICD-10 coding will not only affect our patients care from longer waiting time for authorizations to even denials. I also believe that it will affect the revenue that we receive into our facility from the insurance companies. Judith Veazie (October, 2014) author of the article “Creating an ICD-10 Training Strategy” states that no matter what field of healthcare you are in you will be affected by the current change to ICD-10. This new system provides better ways to submit your insurance claims for processing for reimbursement if coded properly. Veazie also says the benefit of ICD-10 is the specific amounts of codes that are now available to us which in return will be a benefit to our patients and facility.

As necessary as ICD-10 is, smaller practices that only have a few physicians on staff will have more of a difficult time integrating the system than larger organizations. The reason being that larger healthcare organizations tend to have coders. Coders are individuals who hardly ever have contact with patients but they are important in the sense that they are the ones that input the ICD codes into patients’ medical records. Without coders, physicians would have to be the ones to input the ICD codes into the patients’ medical record. Luckily physicians at hospitals and other large health organizations do not need to do this. Unfortunately, physicians at smaller organizations do not have coders at their disposal and they are the ones that enter the ICD codes.

An Electronic Health Record is a computerized form of a patient’s medical chart. These records allow information to be readily available to authorized providers during a patient’s encounter with the healthcare system. These systems do not only contain medical histories, current medications and insurance information, they also track patients’ diagnoses, treatment plans, immunization dates, allergies, radiology images and lab tests/results (source). The fundamental aspect of EHRs is that they are able to share a patient’s information quickly across service lines and even between different healthcare organizations. Information is at the fingertips of lab techs, primary care physicians, pharmacies, clinics, etc. The

Instead, providers will need to use the 10th revision of International Classification of Diseases which uses three to seven characters in an alpha-numeric combination. But besides featuring a different code structure, the new ICD-10 code set contains around 68,000 codes as opposed to the 14,000 codes of ICD-9. That’s significantly more codes and will ensure a greater level of specificity when coding diagnoses.

Besides the disadvantages of (EMR)’s the advantages pose great benefits to patient care and efficiency. The greater use of electronic medical records or health records can reduce wait times, of seeing doctors or waiting for test results. All staff would need to cohesively work out the technical challenges and software data. With sophisticated IT

Electronic health records (EHRs): Medical records are now kept in an electronic versus a paper chart. All health information regarding past and current medical history, treatment plans, and medications are kept in the EHR. The system also allows sharing of medical information from provider to provider as needed. Many HER systems have a feature to allow patients to log into a patient portal to review lab results, diagnostic tests, plans of care, and email access to the provider

1) My hospital initiated this program back in 1999. We also participate in the Statement Immunization Information System (SISS) program. We use this system to check or update vaccination records for our patients. All of our charting is done electronically. This is beneficial because any member of the healthcare team can access a patient’s record from anywhere in the hospital. Any information updated on our end can then be accessed by another provider whom also uses an EHR system. This allows each member of the healthcare team to collaborate, reduce medical errors, minimize medication interactions, and decrease medical costs. All of our patients, are educated on the EHR system that we use from the moment they check in on admission. Throughout their stay, they are instructed on how to access it and how to use it. Upon discharge, they are given an EHR packet and are encouraged to capitalize on all that the program has to offer from the comfort of their own homes.