ICD-10 Education Must Focus on Documentation

With October 1 coming faster than I think we all realize, I want to talk about an article that I think is a great one for Providers.

“ICD-10 education must focus on clinical documentation improvement” is an article by Jennifer Bresnick at EHR Intelligence that explains some of the strategies that will help physicians and coders understand what their goals need to be, and how to accomplish those goals ahead of the ICD-10 implementation date in October…

Excerpt:

“What seems to be the best method for approaching ICD-10 education for physicians?

We actually started ICD-10 education about 18 months ago, and we started with steady, monthly educational sessions that would provide boots-on-the-ground support to the physicians, meaning that we imbedded the education for our documentation specialists and coders into the current ICD-9 clinical documentation improvement programs that our clients actually practice now. We feel that physicians should be educated from a clinical perspective, not a coding perspective. The minute that you start showing them codes, they say, “Oh, I’m not going to remember this. I don’t want to be a coder.”

So, when we talk to physicians, we say, “Here, please tell us clinically the information that we need to be able to code it in ICD-10.” This is where it’s very important that the documentation specialists realize what is the clinical threshold for this particular diagnoses, and what specificity is required, and let them actually interact with physicians in a concurrent fashion or, hopefully, real-time with technology, supporting that real-time interaction in the future. We’ve advocated that this is a practice model. The more you do it, the better you get.”

With the help of Mel Tully of Nuance, Jennifer goes on to explain some of the specifics that providers need to focus on right now. The article also talks about whether or not providers will have the time needed to get the training and education that they will need to be ready for ICD-10.

We Highly Recommend This Article to All Providers.

Authored by:  Jennifer Bresnick on EHR Intelligence

Read the full original article