Reimbursement
The Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI), which bills itself as the leading authority on the use of health IT to improve the exchange of healthcare information, today announced its collaboration with other industry and government entities to support the industry's upgrade to ASC X12 5010.
The American Health Information Management Association has issued a strong recommendation for healthcare providers to adopt ICD-10 as quickly as possible. This comes as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) contemplates delaying the deadline for one year, until Oct. 1, 2014.
Aiming to advance its suite of documentation and coding technologies, 3M has acquired Bethesda, Md.-based CodeRyte, which develops clinical natural language processing and computer-assisted coding tools.
The newly-proposed ICD-10 compliance deadline of October 1, 2014 won't please every healthcare organization. What it does accomplish, though, is to give them a bit of leeway in their project planning.
Recent public comment on changes to the guidelines on the 2010 Affordable Care Act’s physician payments provision, the so-called Sunshine Act, brings to light a number of questions from both sides of the issue of making public the healthcare-related financial dealings of doctors and hospitals who receive Medicare and Medicaid funding.
Citing a CMS survey that found one quarter of providers do not believe they will be ready by October 1, 2013, HHS argues for delaying ICD-10 implementation by one year.
The loose contingent of health professionals railing against the ICD-10 delay will likely consider this welcome news: There is a document circulating the web right now -- with a stamp at the top suggesting it will be published in the Federal Register on April 17, 2012 -- in which HHS proposes that the new compliance date for ICD-10 be October 1, 2014.
Despite the recent economic downturn, jobs in healthcare grew while jobs in other sectors declined, according to a new report by the nonprofit Center for Health Workforce Studies at the University at Albany School of Public Health.
The California Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) announced last week a three-year demonstration project that will take place in four counties aimed at improving care coordination for seniors and persons with disabilities who are dually eligible for Medicare and the state's Medicaid insurance program Medi-Cal.
The fragmented delivery of care and the number of providers involved in a patient's episode of care erects barriers to be able to effectively coordinate care, said the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission during a meeting last Friday.