Physicians must be educated on proper documentation to meet ICD-10 code-set specificity and payer-coverage policies.  Guest commentary from Holly Louie, RN, CHBME, PCS, corporate compliance officer at Practice Management, Inc., in Boise, Idaho The reimbursement impact of ICD-10 implementation on providers has the potential to be more ...

Guest commentary from Valerie M. Chapman, RN, MSN I am a wife, a mother of two awesome kids, a daughter, a sister and a nurse. I am also a survivor. At the age of 43 a routine screening mammogram picked up an abnormality in my left breast that turned out to be invasive lobular carcinoma. I had no family history or major risk factors, but ...

Guest commentary from Celwyn C. Evans, a senior partner at Greencastle Associates Consulting in Malvern, Pa. With the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the focus of debate has fallen squarely on the challenge of defining ''meaningful ...

The Protecting America's Workers Act of 2009, if passed by Congress, would dramatically alter the regulatory regime. Guest commentary from Eric J. Conn and Robert C. Gombar, partners in the law firm of McDermott Will & Emery, LLP, based in Washington, D.C. Just weeks before his death, the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), with the help of ...

Evidence-based medicine will improve the quality of care and impact of each health care dollar spent. Guest commentary from Marc Perlman, global vice president, Healthcare and Life Sciences Industry, Oracle The U.S. health care industry is challenged like never before to improve outcomes while reducing costs. Our current rate of spending is ...

Guest commentary from Physicians for a National Health Program, an organization of 17,000 doctors who support single-payer national health insurance. A research team at Harvard Medical School estimates that 2,266 U.S. military veterans under the age of 65 died last year because they lacked health insurance and thus had reduced access to ...

Guest commentary from William F. Jessee, MD, FACMPE, president and CEO of the Medical Group Management Association The Medical Group Management Association (MGMA) is pleased that the House has voted favorably on H.R. 3962 (The Affordable Health Care for America Act) and we look forward to its rapid action on the companion bill, H.R. 3961, which ...

Recent articles in Wired magazine (“Medical Records: Stored in the Cloud, Sold on the Open Market” www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/medicalrecords) and the New York Times (“When 2+2 Equals a Privacy Question www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/business/18stream.html?_r=3) report that some medical records software companies sell patient information ...

Update: The Danger/Microsoft team reported on Oct. 20 that it has completed its latest round of tests. "We are now ready to make the first phase of the content-restoration process available to you, starting with personal contacts," said a pop-up statement on the Sidekick Web site. "This data restoration effort is only necessary ...

Guest commentary from David St. Clair, founder and CEO of MEDecision, a provider of collaborative health care management solutions. I felt the health care reform news out of Washington last week was decidedly mixed. For those of us who have advocated reform for many, many years, the mere fact that legislation made it past the Senate Finance ...