Sep 25 2007, 1:02 PM EST
News source: Business Wire
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c69486) has announced the addition of Computer Assisted Coding Of Medical Information - Market Opportunities, Strategies, and Forecasts, 2007 to 2013 to their offering.
The number of procedures that use computer assisted coding is set to increase rapidly as the technology becomes more accurate. The trials have been completed successfully. The systems automate a tedious process and create efficient operation in the hospital and physician office environment. In this manner the automation that has been used by banks and manufacturing operations for years is moving to healthcare.
Whereas the healthcare systems have struggled with a payment and collections system that takes 30% of revenue, the banking and financial services industry has been able to run with automated billing systems that take 3% of revenue. As these economies of scale and technology are adapted to the healthcare delivery organizations through computer assisted coding, the most efficient organizations will acquire the less efficient ones.
Computer assisted coding fits seamlessly into a healthcare work flow. An unstructured digitized text from any source. Input can come from transcription services, voice recognition output, and typed note. No templates are needed. Computer assisted coding structures the note and applies appropriate codes. Computer assisted coding checks 100% of the notes and sends information to the billing system or sends notes to auditors for further review. Studies have documented the issues with E&M coding. Over-coding can lead to increased institutional risk. The result is frequent under-coding and lost revenue.
Manual coding processes are tedious and time consuming. After a patient is discharged, a clerk would physically retrieve the medical documents and pass it to a health records analyst who would extract the appropriate information for the billing system. Then the medical record would be passed onto a coder who would write the codes onto a paper face sheet. Next the face sheet would get passed to a data entry operator who would again access the billing system and enter the coding information into the account for final billing.
Computer assisted coding is set to evolve a hybrid technology where the physician develops natural language descriptions of patient conditions that are combined with a set of scales to evaluate patient condition in a more methodical and measurable manner. Just as patients are asked to measure pain on a scale of one to ten, so also physicians will measure patient condition as it relates to a relative scale.
The scale will not be universal, but rather, specific to the physician. The scale will be relative to a physician own experience. In this manner, the expertise of the physician will carry over from one patient to another.
The physician will develop techniques for describing patient condition that are in natural language, then these will be adapted to a coding scale that the physician has control of as well as the natural language coding software.
Computer assisted coding applications depend on the development of production quality natural language processing (NLP)-based computer assisted coding applications. This requires a process-driven approach to software development and quality assurance. A well-defined software engineering process consists of requirements analysis, preliminary design, detailed design, implementation, unit testing, system testing and deployment.
NLP complex technology defines the key features of a computer assisted coding (CAC) application.
The centres for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) is focused on reducing overpayments attributable to claims that do not meet medical necessity requirements. Compounding the situation, CMS rules and policies are updated and are interpreted differently from a fiscal inter
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