The National Center for Healthcare Statistics has released its annual ICD-9-CM update to the index and tabular list of codes. The changes take effect October 1, 2008.

Ask the expert: Has CMS updated the Fiscal Intermediary Shared System (FISS) to recognize hospitals that are exempt from present on admission (POA) reporting?

When drafting a disaster recovery plan, it’s important to know where data is stored, says Chris Apgar, CISSP, president of Apgar & Associates, LLC, in Portland, OR. Data availability not only helps ensure patient safety during emergencies and disasters, it’s also a Joint Commission (formerly JCAHO) and HIPAA requirement.

The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) requires coders to query when physician documentation is illegible, incomplete, unclear, inconsistent, imprecise, or unreliable. Yet one of the many omnipresent challenges that coders face is how to obtain more thorough documentation in such a way that doesn’t lead the physician toward an assumed condition.