Buzzwords at HIMSS: Looking Under the Hood

By: Jeremy Zasowski

Analytics!  Automated!  Intelligent Solutions!

There are plenty of hot buzzwords and phrases flying around HIMSS this week. The reaction from hospital and health system executives hasn’t been complete enthusiasm.  The CIOs, CMIOs, and CTOs I’ve talked with have expressed caution about the many analytics solutions they’re seeing on the exhibit floor.  I’m hearing questions and comments such as “What analytics model is this based on? How do we know what will be the standard analytics framework going forward?  There are too many models out there with no clear leader.”

Hospital administrators and management want to “look under the hood” so to speak; understand the details and logic behind the analytics and behind the automation.  From the reaction so far, most vendors aren’t doing a good enough job at helping hospitals answer these fundamental questions.

Learn more about 3M Health Information Systems and how 3M experts can help you improve healthcare efficiency and outcomes—visit the team in booth #3334 at HIMSS12.

Viva Las Vegas! What to See and Do at #HIMSS12

Beyond the hubbub of the latest news surrounding ICD-10 implementation, a host of exciting events and adventures are just getting started at the 2012 HIMSS Annual Conference. Take a look below for up-to-the-minute information about speakers, sessions, and events happening this week in Las Vegas.

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, keynotes the HIMSS kickoff (Follow updates on Twitter with #HIMSS12). His presence reflects the huge strides the healthcare industry is taking in embracing social media.

On a similar note, the HIMSS Social Media Center (Follow updates on Twitter with #HSMC) is entering its second year and boasts a series of seminars on communicating in the new arena. And with the help of InfluentialNetworks.com, visitors can also take advantage of the HIMSS Social Media Genius Bar, designed to enable a greater understanding of the use of social technology in healthcare and provide an opportunity for online influencers to network offline.

ICD-10 Benefits: Public Health

By: Ann F. Chenoweth

The US is the only industrialized nation not using an ICD-10 based classification system for morbidity purposes.  This makes it difficult to share disease data internationally at a time when such sharing is critical for public health.  As a result, the US’s ability to track and respond to global threats in real time is limited.

Adoption of ICD-10-CM will facilitate international comparisons of quality of care and the sharing of best practices globally. Overall, ICD-10 is more effective at capturing public health diseases than ICD-9.  It is more specific and fully captures more of the nationally reportable public health diseases, diseases related to the top ten causes of mortality, and diseases related to terrorism.

The additional detail and precision supplied by ICD-10 codes provides the ability to assess the patterns of conditions that exist within populations.  Data can be used by payers and providers to define shifts in patterns of illness in a timely fashion to support patient-health improvement measures to mitigate health risk associated with these changing patterns of illness.

The greater specificity of clinical information available with ICD-10 will help guide public health policy and strategies by, for example, having data available regarding the impact of an intervention or the epidemiology of a condition.  This can only serve to benefit public health.

Go Team! Project Management in Healthcare IT

By: Jill Devrick

My last several posts have described the makeup and responsibilities of a team that is implementing a new technology project.  The reality of working with a project team can be messy.  Recruiting your team and “getting everyone on board” are two very different concepts.

I have found that the attitude of individual project team members can vary widely. For example, you’ll find a big difference in the level of enthusiasm between someone who volunteered to participate versus someone who was drafted. So keep in mind that not every person will have the same level of commitment, nor will they place the project at the same level of priority as everyone else. Regardless of recruitment method, you need to set expectations with each person regarding participation and task completion.

Role of Standard Terminologies in Meaningful Use: Part One

By: Susan Matney

As part of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), the 2009 Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act has the goal of using electronic health records (EHRs) to promote patient safety and interoperability between and within healthcare systems. The initiatives outlined in the HITECH Act are known as “meaningful use” (MU), which contains three key components:

1. Use of a certified EHR to meet improvement and efficiency goals
2. Electronic exchange of health information to improve outcomes
3. Electronic submission of clinical and quality measures

Over the past few years, as healthcare organizations and providers have focused intently on implementing or enhancing their EHRs and documenting MU, many began the process with the sense that their EHRs would handle most if not all of the MU challenges they would encounter. Other organizations assumed that implementing the necessary clinical terminology standards required for collecting and sharing patient data would also be enough to achieve their MU objectives.

Are Templates the Answer?

By: Jeremy Zasowski

What happens when clinical documentation strategies to meet Meaningful Use requirements don’t line up with an organization’s strategies to improve clinical documentation for coding and profiling?

In my interactions with our customers, we’re seeing an increasing number of hospitals moving to increase their physicians’ adoption of template-based EHR documentation workflows. The primary reasons include: the need to move away from hand-written, paper-based notes; the need to leverage the huge investment made in an EHR; and, the requirement to meet Meaningful Use criteria for their EHR.

ICD-10 for Busy Physicians: Why the number of ICD-10 codes is not a big deal

By: Rhonda Butler

Believe it or not, you do not need to know or care about how many ICD-10 codes there are.  I know this goes against the grain. It is almost the only thing that gets said about ICD-10. Apologies in advance to all of you who already understand that the total number of codes in the system: (1) doesn’t dramatically affect your job, (2) isn’t inherently any more disruptive or costly than any other software upgrade, and (3) is mentioned by consultants and commentators because it is an easy score.

First, a question or two:  Did you know how many codes there were in ICD-9 before everyone started comparing? There are roughly 17,000 ICD-9 codes. Do you know and care about each one of them? Of those 17,000, how many get coded every day by your coders?

Here are three reasons why the increased size of ICD-10 will not be an overwhelming burden on your practice.

Read my latest blog at PhysBizTech.

ICD-10 Basics: Advancing Healthcare IT

By: Ann Frischkorn Chenoweth

Upgrading to ICD-10 is a necessary step in realizing health IT potential. ICD-10 data are more easily retrieved in electronic format than ICD-9 data.   Because the code set is more robust and up-to-date, it offers better mapping from SNOMED CT.   The full benefits of a reference terminology such as SNOMED CT will not be realized if that system is mapped to an obsolete classification system such as ICD-9-CM.

Computer Assisted Coding (CAC) offers improved coding consistency, efficiency, and accuracy.   The detailed and logical structure of ICD-10 simplifies the development of map rules and algorithms used in CAC applications. As a result, ICD-10 more easily enables CAC.

ICD-10 is a good opportunity to phase out aging and inflexible systems or to modernize legacy systems.  Many CIOs I’ve met with state they are leveraging their ICD-10 readiness/system inventory work to consolidate redundant applications.  Moreover it is giving them an opportunity to look for new platforms and vendor solutions which can be used across the enterprise.

ICD-10 for Busy Doctors

By: Rhonda Butler

This is the first in what I hope will be a useful series of blogs on the subject of ICD-10. Building on a previous blog, my goal is to offer clear, concise information about ICD-10 to physicians and physician practice managers, so they can focus on the key differences between the code sets—differences that actually matter for coding and documentation.

Basically, ICD-10 is a long overdue upgrade. ICD-9 is old as the hills and needs to be replaced. The ICD-9 classification contains notions of disease and treatment from the 1960s that don’t do any of us any good — the antiquated content of ICD-9 means physicians have to spend time answering questions about clinical language that hasn’t been used in a generation or more. If you would like more on this subject, see an earlier blog, “ICD is a System and Systems are Upgraded.”

Initial focus will highlight some general differences between ICD-9 and ICD-10 — not the ones that make for good yellow journalism, like the number of ICD-10 codes for getting bitten by various animals, but differences in clinical  terminology that are interesting from the point of view of good coding and documentation.

Read my latest blog at PhysBizTech.

Data Standards, Natural Language Processing, and Healthcare IT

By: Richard Wolniewicz

With so many healthcare organizations evaluating applications that use natural language processing (NLP), I’m often asked if there is a specific standard that defines NLP best practice. Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or UIMA, is a technical platform that runs inside a computer process and serves to integrate a pipeline of software components, each of which executes a single NLP step (more on NLP processes and steps next time). The UIMA platform is used for NLP across many industries, not just Healthcare.