ICD-10-CM diabetes codes complement present medical science—separate type 1 and type 2 diabetes category codes and body system combination codes represent a major improvement over ICD-9-CM.

An ambulatory surgery operative report for a 75-year-old male patient states that the patient received a full- thickness graft of the cheek following lesion removal of a basal carcinoma.

Large health systems and their IT vendors are creating private information exchange networks at a time when federally funded state operations are gearing up for launch. Is there room for private and public offerings in the new HIE marketplace?

Health information exchange is about more than just connecting providers for the electronic transfer of records. Direct financial benefits can also result from this exchange. Accountable care organizations (ACOs), which incentivize competing providers to link together and exchange data in order to lower costs and share savings, are becoming a true market driver for private and public HIE development.

Close to 200 AHIMA members participated in the 2012 AHIMA Capitol Hill Day, which took place in Washington D.C. in March. Watch the video for a slideshow of images from the 2012 AHIMA Hill Day.

An article in Health Affairs titled “There Are Important Reasons For Delaying the Implementation Of The New ICD-10 Coding System” asserts that the ICD-10-CM conversion will be “expensive, arduous, disruptive, and of limited direct clinical benefit.”

Contrary to the conclusions in this article, implementation of the ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS code sets will provide major advantages over the existing ICD-9-CM code set. Implementation is long overdue and will provide significant cost benefits.

This patient, a 47-year-old male with adenoma of the prostate, is being treated in the outpatient surgery suite.