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| Services for... |
Services for Provider Organizations Today’s world of clinical computing is getting more and more complex. Federal initiatives are moving towards standardization of healthcare terminology. Now SNOMED is freely available to individuals and organizations doing business in the US. These are confusing times for healthcare providers and organizations. “Gee, I’ve looked at SNOMED and it is overwhelming. It will be tough for our physicians to use this.” This is a common lament heard in clinical IT shops around the country. So what should a healthcare organization be doing for a terminology strategy? Why is it important? Why can’t billing data simply be used? Billing data or more specifically ICD-9 and CPT codes are critical for doing the business of healthcare. However, they do not necessarily allow clinicians to capture the clinical detail in, for example, the problem list. Billing data has limitations because of the coarse granularity of the ICD-9 codes. The buckets are too big at times and too fine at times. But we still need ICD-9 codes for billing, right? Of course, but we believe that ICD-9 codes are necessary but not sufficient to allow clinicians to say what they need to say to practice high quality medicine leveraging the increasing use of information technologies. Specifically, we can...
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