Industry Insight

Practice Insight and AIMSVAR Resellers Take Aim at Easing the ICD-10 Transition

EDI software developer and claims processing provider Practice Insight and the majority of members in the Association of Independent Medical Software Value Added Resellers (AIMSVAR) have aligned to help support providers with legacy practice management systems seeking to make the transition to ICD-10. The AIMSVAR organization has created a committee of resellers who are working with Practice Insight to deliver ICD-9 to ICD-10 solutions.

“The challenges associated with the transition to ICD-10 are significant, especially for providers’ practice management systems that have been sunset,” says Practice Insight CEO Houston Johnson. “Because our know-how can assist our resellers in their efforts to ease this financially critical transition for providers, it’s a win-win-win situation.”

Kevin Knutson, with AIMSVAR member Automated Medical Systems, says Practice Insight’s “holistic EDI solution enables us to provide our customers all types of electronic claims, remittance, and statements regardless of the PM/EMR version or software vendor. They are a key advantage for us in meeting ICD-10 mandates for our customers.”

B.J. Dvorak, with AIMSVAR member eProvider Solutions, says Practice Insight’s “EDI software has allowed us to determine if ICD-10 end-to-end test claims would be revenue neutral and, if not, specifically where our providers might see revenue differences in ICD-10 vs ICD-9. The bottom line is that our alliance with Practice Insight gives our provider clients total confidence they are ahead of the industry curve, not behind.”

— Source: Practice Insight

 

Study: EHR Safety Issues Linger After Implementation

Patient safety issues related to EHRs persist long after the go-live date, according to research published online in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. Sophisticated monitoring systems are needed to unearth the complex mix of human and technological causes behind these problems, the authors say.

EHRs can improve the quality of patient care, but recent evidence suggests that their use also can prompt new patient safety concerns, such as when computer glitches cause clinical decision support to suddenly stop working or when network outages occur. Many of these problems are complex and multifaceted, and difficult to detect and prevent, according to the authors.

In a bid to better understand the nature of these patient safety concerns, the authors reviewed 100 closed investigations involving 344 technology-related incidents arising between 2009 and 2013 at the VA. The VA adopted EHRs in 1999 and is a leader in patient safety and HIT use. It runs a voluntary reporting system for HIT safety reporting and analysis.

The authors looked at safety concerns related to the technology itself as well as human and operational factors such as user behaviors, clinical workflow demands, and organizational policies and procedures involving technology. Three quarters of the investigations involved unsafe technology, while the remainder involved unsafe use of technology. Seventy percent of the investigations identified a mix of two or more technical and/or nontechnical underlying factors.

The most common types of safety concerns were related to the display of information in the EHR, software upgrades or modifications, and transmission of data between different components of the EHR system. More often than not, the concerns arose as a result of the complex interaction between nontechnical dimensions, such as workflow, and technical dimensions, such as software/hardware and the user interface.

“Safety concerns we identified had complex sociotechnical origins and would need multifaceted strategies for improvement,” the authors wrote. And they suggest that organizations with longstanding EHR systems, as well as those just starting to implement them, should ensure they have good monitoring and risk assessment protocols in place to detect and mitigate these sorts of patient safety incidents.

— Source: BMJ