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....

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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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....