Lahey Hospital and Medical Center Recieves MaHIMA HIM Team Excellence Award

Lahey Hospital and Medical Center has been honored with the 2013 Massachusetts Health Information Management Association (MaHIMA) HIM Team Excellence Award.

The HIM Team Excellence Award recognizes outstanding effort by a department or team (two or more individuals) in meeting the challenges of the ever changing HIM environment through a new process or technique.

Lahey’s nomination describes their clinical documentation improvement (CDI) program which, due to continuous team efforts, has grown and strengthened Lahey’s clinical documentation to best reflect the quality of patient care, while increasing accuracy in coding and reporting. The stated goals of the CDI program are as follows:

1. Maintain a higher case mix index and assure accurate reimbursement; and

2. Maintain accurate SOI (Severity of Illness) and ROM (Risk of mortality) indicators for quality metrics.

Lahey Hospital and Medical Center/HIM team members include Gayle Faro, HIM manager of coding and clinical documentation improvement program; Karen Ahearn, inpatient coder; Richard Edgerly, inpatient coder; Linda Griffin, inpatient coder; Kathy Madden, inpatient coder; Karen Martin, inpatient coder; Cheryl Rosa, CDIS specialist; Chris Goodnow, CDIS specialist; Thomas Sills, MD validator; Shelly Graham, project manager; and Lisa Davis, report writer.

The award was presented on March 28, 2013 by Jeanne Fernandes, director of communications for MaHIMA, at the Lahey campus in Burlington.

Source: Massachusetts Health Information Management Association