Healthcare IT News - May 2008 - (Page 5)

www.HealthcareITNews.com INDUSTRY NEWS May 2008 • Healthcare IT News 5 Continuedfrom page 1 CRACI<DOWN Standards worl< gains momentum BY BERNIE MONEGAIN, Editor NEW YORK - order to avoid becoming a target Watch your billing profiles and don't cluster around one level of a code." Under the new RAe program, doctors and hospitals could be asked to provide documentation to support the bills they submitted to Medicare as far back as 2007. According to one expert, hospitals could expect to get several requests for documentation per week. Julie Chicoine, a lawyer, registered nurse and certified proJulie Chicoine fessional coder, said The head of the panel charged with setting technology standards to ensure interoperability among healthcare information technology systems across the country said the process of defining and creating those standards is about to accelerate. "We're getting ready to really scale up in the future," said John Halamka, chairman of the Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel, or HITSP, and CIa at Harvard Medical School. HITSP works under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services and makes recommendations on standards that technology companies would adopt as they develop and market healthcare information technology. "One of my goals for HITSP as we get more and more exchange of lab data. patient involvement is When new use cases arise that everyone uses one in these categories, he said, standard," Halamka said the foundational standards at the HIMSS Virtual will already be in place and Conference last month. will merely require tweakHe said the work ing. "We're trying to get a would go more quickly John Halamka, MD truly parsimonious numnow that standards have ber of interchangeable been defined for some use cases, parts," he said.• such as biosurveillance, consum- MORE AT HealthcareITNews.com er empowerment and electronic GConnect STANDARDS 0508 she is considering implementing internal audits soon at Ohio State University Medical Center, where she is the compliance director. Chicoine said the medical center is putting together a task force of doctors, hospital managers, IT experts and others to plan a way for handling the audit letters. Her hospital will focus on checking how well it is documenting for Office of the Inspector General "hot buttons," such as those listed in the last RAe report. A private audit would enable the hospital to find inadvertent documentation errors and allow time to resolve them before the crackdown, in some cases reporting them to the Medicare payment contractor in advance, Chicoine said. Sheri Poe Bernard, head of the American Academy of Professional Coders national advisory board, said doctors often lack regulatory background and an inclination for coding. "Most doctors think they are doing what's best for their patients and feel their intentions are good, so what can Sheri Poe go wrong," she said. Bernard "The fact is a lot can go wrong." Bernard warned doctors to beware of new electronic medical record software that claims it provides compliant coding automatically. "Right now it's very rustic," she said. "More than ever, it's important to have coders." The RACS will have certified coders on their audit teams. Bernard said for a long time documentation has been less than perfect and overlooked by CMS. This crackdown is likely to happen painfully fast, she said. According to Bernard, providers who find their own shortcomings and report them will have a better opportunity of negotiating their fines. If they set a course of creating the correct documentation to match billing, they will avoid trouble in the future. However, they won't be able to correct documentation CMS audits back to 2007, she said.• MORE AT HealthcarelTNews.com GConnect CRACKDOWN 0508 http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://www.HealthcareITNews.com http://HealthcareITnews.com http://HealthcareITNews.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9154 http://CDWHealthcare.com http://CDWHealthcare.com http://HealthcareITnews.com http://HealthcarelTNews.com http://CDW.com http://CDW.com http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9139 http://www.healthcareitnews.com/story.cms?id=9190

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Healthcare IT News - May 2008 Contents Help Wanted Speeding Up Government Silos Privacy Pressures Tracking Disease Rah Rah Health! TriZetto Suit Outcomes Watch Ambulatory EHRs

Healthcare IT News - May 2008

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