Universal Definition: Acute MI

Universal Definition of Myocardial
Infarction. Circulation 2007; 116: 2634-2653
This helps to explain why we see more documentation of “demand” MI and why it’s part of the universal definition for acute MI. Troponin leak? Demand ischemia? When does the coder assign an acute MI? Are all coders aware of the universal definition? I’d like to see it [...]

Open Document Formats

New York State has issued a report from their study on document formats and electronic records. The report is available for download as a Word document (doc), PDF or open document format (ODF). I opted for the ODF because it’s smaller and I have OpenOffice available (for free) to read it. The major recommendation of [...]

Gears with Googledocs

Just to follow-up from an earlier thought, gears with googledocs is great. Work offline and when you go online, your docs, spreadsheets or presentations are updated automatically. I’m impressed. If you don’t have gmail or googledocs, get an account. You won’t regret it.

HR 4105

I’m not sure if I agree with AHIMA’s advocacy in favor of HR 4105, to impose a moratorium on the use of recovery audit contractors (RAC) under the Medicare Integrity Program. While I understand there have been issues in the demonstration project, the job of audit recovery is to find payment and collection errors. Many [...]

Goodbye JCAHO, Hello NIAHO

In case you missed the news, there will soon be an alternative in health accreditation.
Det Norske Veritas (DNV) has applied to CMS to become a hospital accreditation service. Unlike the JCAHO, DNV will use ISO 9001 Quality Managment System standards in the accreditation process.
DNV HealthCare Inc. has developed the National Integrated Accreditation for [...]

Gears

Google Gears is ready to change the way you think. You can now work offline on your favorite documents and “gears” enabled web applications. Then when you go online, gears automatically updates the web application. I tested it out using the web based task app, Remember the Milk. Sure enough I was offline, added a [...]

UHDDS

I was trying to find the latest info on the uniform hospital discharge data set (UHDDS) from the National Committee on Vital Health and Statistics (NCVHS). The NCVHS website search was not very helpful, but there is a “Core Health Data Elements Report” from 1996. I remember the 1992 revision and still have the [...]