Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2012

In March, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT published a proposed rule on EHR certification, a companion to the proposed rule on stage 2 of the meaningful use EHR incentive program that was published on the same day by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2012

There are few surprises in CMS's proposed rule on stage 2 of the meaningful use program. The provisions generally reflect the recommendations of the Health IT Policy Committee made last year, and in the case of the intended change to the timeline, an announcement was made last December.
....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: February 2012

In a January 6 blog post, Farzad Mostashari, MD, national coordinator for health IT, summarized a busy year at his office, highlighting 10 of 2011's "most notable developments in the world of health information technology and ONC."

Among these were 62 regional health IT extension ce....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: January 2012

Last summer the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT heard repeatedly from providers and vendors that they would not have time to prepare for stage 2 of the meaningful use program. With a final rule on stage 2 not expected until summer 2012, vendors and hospitals did not see how th....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: November 2011

Perhaps one of the biggest jobs related to implementing the ARRA provisions right now is keeping track of the moving parts. Publication of the act in 2009 was a kind of Big Bang-an explosion of provisions that rocked the healthcare universe. Since then, however, the pieces have traveled at dif....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2011

The Office for Civil Rights has been publicly reporting incidents of large-scale health data breaches since early 2010, but last month it reported to Congress numbers that the industry has only guessed at to date-the reports it has received of breaches involving fewer than 500 individuals.

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: September 2011

Approximately 77,000 healthcare providers had registered for the meaningful use EHR incentive programs through July, program officials told the Health IT Policy Committee at its August 3 meeting. That is a significant number, but it leaves plenty of eligible providers and hospitals still to re....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: July 2011

The Office for Civil Rights proposed rule on the HITECH modifications to the HIPAA accounting of disclosure provision contains an interesting attempt to balance the mandates of the statute with the realities of today's accountings.

OCR was faced with the difficult task of expanding a....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: June 2011

This spring, as the first providers began attesting to their performance in stage 1 of the meaningful use program, the rest of the industry seemed too absorbed with the program's next phase to take much notice.

Through the spring a subgroup of the Health IT Policy Committee was prepa....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2011

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act came out with a bang in February 2009. The rules enacting its privacy and security provisions, however, have trickled out over the subsequent two years. Many of the provisions have the potential for significant impact on HIM operations, and the slow p....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: September 2010

The HIPAA privacy rule generally conveys to individuals the same rights in death that they held in life. Two current proposals would change that, reducing the protections that covered entities currently must afford a deceased patient's record and easing access to decedent records by family....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2010

Improving the ability of patients to understand and apply health information goes hand in hand with designing systems that deliver it. Both are needed to improve outcomes and reduce disparities.

Recent federal initiatives to promote health IT, including the “meaningful use” EHR incen....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA - website

Publication Date: December 2009

Dec 02, 2009 07:00 am

The AHIMA Board of Directors announced Tuesday that it has selected Alan F. Dowling, PhD, to serve as CEO of the American Health Information Management Association.

Dowling has more than 35 years experience in health informatics, with a broad-base....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA - website

Publication Date: October 2009

Kevin Heubusch


Oct 12, 2009 12:05 pm

In one sense, the future is already here for those who manage health information. The skills HIM professionals need today are not very different from those they’ll need in 10 years, according to a new survey of practitioners, recruiters,....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2009

Organizations undertaking EHR system design, planning, and implementation can become so focused on getting the clinical details right that they forget to put sufficient attention to the legal implications of maintaining the information over time.


Turning an organization&rsquo....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2008

David Diaz, RHIA, is an HIM systems analyst at Rady Children’s Hospital–San Diego. The role blends information management and information services functions. “It’s a little different,” he says, but it works well for the facility and its electronic record system.

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: August 2008

Selecting, financing, and launching an EHR system is difficult. Product certification seeks to make the first step a little easier.

Somewhere on your toaster oven is a UL sticker. That’s your reasonable assurance that the appliance won’t burst into flames. Likewise, the t....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: August 2008

Health information management professionals offer contemporary physician practices a lot of expertise. In the coming era, they offer even more.

Sometimes overlooked in the talk about information technology is information management. For all the benefits that IT offers physician pract....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: July 2008

A care assessment tool for Medicare beneficiaries, currently used in a demonstration project, points the way to a unified, standardized federal assessment tool.

Patients who transition between inpatient, rehabilitation, and long-term care facilities face risk. Their transitions are o....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: July 2008

Coding departments are hectic places in 2008, busy adapting to new requirements. To meet the challenges, they are seeking the right staffing, education, and coordination.



How many challenges does coding face today? Open positions, revenue cycle, MS-DRGs, POA, RACs,....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: June 2008

The personal health record market looks like a blur, but organizing around common technical standards will help PHRs gain traction with providers, payers, and consumers.

In late April the National Alliance for Health Information Technology released a consensus definition for a person....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2008

Margie White started out as a nursing assistant in acute care. A brochure for AHIMA’s independent study program introduced her to HIM. She completed the program and applied for a job as medical record clerk in a long-term care facility.

And she kept going. White earned her RHI....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2007

ICD codes are used the world over. The circumstances for the coders who apply them, however, are by no means standard. Opportunities for education, professional development, and workplace recognition vary widely around the world.

That is changing this spring, as two organizations in....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2007

Providers, payers, and employers are excited about personal health records (PHRs), as are vendors, policy groups, and the federal government. But what about consumers, the half of the equation that will use them?

When asked, the general population typically says they are in....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2007

What health information is most useful to consumers? That’s a question only consumers can answer, one by one.
The personal health record, or PHR, might lack a common definition, a common data set, a common format, and a short list of sponsors. But it has one thing i....

Author: Bloomrosen, Meryl; Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: April 2006

Rapidly advancing data exchange initiatives have left a trail of acronyms in their wake. Is a SNO a RHIO, and where did LHIIs go?



As thinking on the nature of regional and nationwide data exchange evolves, terms devised from necessity have been left behind just as....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: March 2006

Data standards may seem like the work of IT specialists, but Nancy LeRoy knows that HIM can contribute valuable information about document flow and management. "The nuts and bolts of the HIM profession feed into standards work," she says.

LeRoy, BS, CCS, CCP, serves as cochair of th....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: January 2006

Healthcare’s hottest topic finally has two things it has badly needed: plain language and a sense of urgency.
Every health information story in 2006 will circle back to one word. In one way or another, every HIM story this year will relate to interoperability.

Healthcare....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2005

It’s an amazing challenge,” Suzanne Columbus admits. By 2008 the senior EHR implementation advisor must help at least 500 physician practices adopt health IT.

Columbus works at IPRO, New York State’s quality improvement organization (QIO). That puts her in the middl....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2005

Scan Michelle Wieczorek’s credentials—RN, RHIT, CPHQ, CPUR—and consider how she came to work at the center of the external and internal Web sites of a major health system.

The biggest reason doesn’t have to do with knowing how information becomes pixels on a s....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: January 2005

When Angela Lehman, RHIA, arrived at Oklahoma Heart Hospital, Oklahoma City, in April 2004, the facility was less than two years old. From day one, it had been nearly paperless. For Lehman, the director of health information, the hospital leadership’s full commitment to the EHR’s s....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: July 2004

On the heels of new medical procedures and new devices come the new codes and new interpretations to describe them. That’s why Terry Tropin says that coding’s biggest challenge is “keeping up.”
Tropin, RHIA, CCS-P, CPC, is manager of coding education at the Ameri....

Author: Heubusch, Kevin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: March 2004

In HIM, the universe is expanding. The key to expanding with it, says Mechel McKinney, BSB/A, RHIA, is education: educating yourself to do bigger and better HIM work and educating upper management about HIM’s important role throughout an organization.

McKinney began her HIM car....