(This guest blog was written by Bill Sinn, marketing director, healthcare practice, Pitney Bowes Software.) It's only three years since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law by President Obama, and the industry is already seeing huge changes. For instance, the U.S. has expanded the number of citizens receiving preventative care, ...

(This guest blog was written by Kayla M. Zirbes of The College of Saint Scholastica. Zirbes is an AHIMA student advisory council member and AHIMA Hill Day 2013 participant.)As a member of the American Health Information Management Association's Student Advisory Council (SAC), I have benefited from many unique opportunities to become active within ...

The proposed rule to delay the compliance date for ICD-10 from Oct. 1, 2013 to Oct. 1, 2014 is posted to the Federal Register, and there is only 1 week left in the 30-day comment period. When proposing the delay to ICD-10, HHS took into consideration feedback that some provider groups have concerns about their ability to meet the Oct. 1, 2013 ...

If you attended the 2012 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition, held in Las Vegas at the Venetian Sands Expo Center from Feb. 20-24, you were part of a record-breaking event. As of Friday morning, attendance at HIMSS12 reached 37,032 attendees, surpassing the HIMSS11 attendance figure of 31,500 attendees. They participated in more than 300 ...

The Beacon Community Cooperative Agreement Program provides funding to 17 selected communities throughout the United States that have already made inroads in the development of secure, private and accurate systems of electronic health record (EHR) adoption and health information exchange. The Beacon Program is supporting these ...

Kaiser Permanente has donated its Convergent Medical Terminology (CMT) to the International Healthcare Terminology Standards Development Organisation (IHTSDO) for U.S. distribution through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) so that all health care providers-large and small-can benefit from the translation-enabling ...

In a letter last week directed to Georgina Verdugo, JD, LLM, MPA, director of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) responded to the July 14 proposed privacy rule changes pursuant to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA). AHIMA President ...

The Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT), Chicago, and the Drummond Group Inc. (DGI), Austin, TX, were named yesterday by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) as the first technology review bodies that have been authorized to test and certify electronic health record (EHR) ...

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) will host a follow-up national provider conference call on ''ICD-10 Implementation in a 5010 Environment.'' Subject matter experts will review basic information on both ICD-10 and 5010 and explain how they are interrelated. A question and answer session will follow the ...

The American Hospital Association (AHA) has just released the results from its 2010 first quarter RACTrac survey, a free, web-based survey designed in response to a lack of data and information provided by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on the impact of the Recovery Audit Contractor (RAC) program on America's ...