Living in Denial(s) with Karen Elmore, BJC Healthcare

Listen to the program here.   Karen Elmore is living in denial(s).    Her job as Senior Clinical Documentation Quality Coordinator for BJC Healthcare involves a daily battle against a never-ending tide: Payers denying diagnoses on the perceived basis of lack of clinical support. Recently she’s had to deal not only with human payers, but…

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Yet another reason to implement Annual Wellness Visits into your CDI/coding efforts

Detection of early cognitive decline the latest benefit of covered Medicare/Medicare Advantage service By Brian Murphy Medicare Annual Wellness Visits (AWVs) are an important piece of patient wellness and appropriate capture of acuity/severity of illness. But they’re also underutilized. You can now add another reason why you should be working to use them as a…

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To broaden your perspective on work and life, keep climbing

By Justin Satterfield, CEO and Founder, Norwood My colleague and friend Clayton Simons has an uncle who climbed every “fourteener” in Colorado. These are mountains with an elevation of 14,000 feet or greater. There are 58 of them. Clayton and I plan to climb them all, too. Earlier this month we knocked off four in…

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Revka Stearns: Eight months later (and wiser)—Part 2 of 2

Listen to the recording here: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/HvfKYIDsKNb  We’re happy to bring you part 2 of our interview with Revka Stearns, who joined us on Off the Record to provide an update of her first eight months on the job as a new inpatient coder. If you haven’t listened to part 1 I’d recommend starting there, since…

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Should hospitals include clinical definitions in payer contracts? Hear one legal opinion

By Brian Murphy   Establishing facilitywide diagnosis definitions is the gold standard for many organizations. If providers and the CDI/coding team agree on what constitutes postoperative respiratory failure for example, clinical disagreements should be greatly reduced, the need for queries lessened, and coding accuracy improved.   Unfortunately, payers also (appear) to have the same leeway…

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Revka Stearns: Eight months later (and wiser)—Part 1 of 2

Listen to the episode here: https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/EBiWUwjOmNb Back in January I hosted newly minted medical coder Revka Stearns. For someone so new to the industry, Revka has made a big impact by the act of sharing–documenting her journey in detailed and open fashion on LinkedIn and Facebook, and a half dozen podcasts and programs. At the…

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Study of housing instability ICD-10 codes a call to arms for improved capture of social determinants of health

Norwood insights

By Brian Murphy   Z59 and other social determinants of health (SDOH) are difficult to capture in ICD-10. How are you doing it? A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) demonstrated that housing instability, as captured with the Z59 series, is not being accurately assigned. At all. The JAMA…

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Malnutrition a major factor in readmissions; make compliant CDI and coding capture your priority

By Brian Murphy   File this under reason 1,227 to diligently work to capture malnutrition.   Medscape recently covered a study published in Aging Clinical and Experimental Research. The study followed 319 patients aged 65+, hospitalized for the first time with COPD in Southwest China. Median age was 76 days and patients averaged five comorbidities.…

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