Author: Gordon, Lynne Thomas

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2015

We must transform healthcare into a data-driven culture… because that’s where our bosses are headed.


A recent issue of Hospitals & Health Networks cited data analytics as one of the top skills that will be most critical in the next three years for healthcare....

Author: Weinberg, Jason; Peterson, Stephanie; Marc, David; Sandefer, Ryan

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2015

AHIMA defines information governance as “the enterprise-wide framework for managing information throughout its lifecycle and supporting the organization’s strategy, operations, regulatory, legal, risk and environmental requirements.”1 AHIMA recognizes that successful heal....

Author: Butler, Mary

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2015

Washington, DC, has one of the highest populations of individuals who either have AIDS or are HIV-positive in the US. In an effort to improve early diagnosis rates, treatment compliance, and prevention, researchers are using innovative data analytics methods to track participants in a pil....

Author: Moschel, Matthew

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2015

Too often, data analysts make life difficult for themselves. An analyst may produce code that is much longer and more complicated than it needs to be, causing a coworker to re-run code for several hours, not including the execute time. Why? These challenges stem from three root sources of....

Author: Wiedemann, Lou Ann

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2015

Do you analyze case mix? Have you been asked to run a report on patients seen in the emergency department with dog bites? Do you report monthly physician query trends? Have you ever been asked to “pull that information out of the EHR?” Do you know that revenue code 361 often re....

Author: Orlova, Anna

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: September 2015

Medical informatics is a field formalized in the 1990s with the rise of the adoption of information technology in healthcare including electronic health records systems (EHRs), laboratory information management systems (LIMS), radiology systems, and other health information technology (HIT....

Author: Easterling, Sharon

Source: CodeWrite | AHIMA newsletter article

Publication Date: September 2015

With the implementation of the Value-Based Purchasing Model (VBP) and, more recently, statements in the Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) fix, it remains clear that healthcare is going through a time of change. We must recognize risk in not only patient health management and outcomes, bu....

Author: Overgaard, Shauna M; Dooling, Julie A

Source: AHIMA blog post | Journal of AHIMA - website

Publication Date: August 27, 2015

Healthcare payments are shifting and the industry is in a rapid state of change. Efficiencies to render patient care as a top priority are crucial. Measuring brings efficiencies and meaning to a patient population.

High-Level Measurements


Population-based statistics....

Author: Head, Erin

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: August 2015

For many decades, health information management (HIM) departments have been the hub for information collected within healthcare organizations. HIM has frequently been referred to as the “medical records department” due to the perceived idea that the department’s main tasks are receiving a....

Author: AHIMA Staff

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: July 2015

It is the matchup of the century—the towering hulk of healthcare’s Big Data versus the super computer known as Watson. Will Watson be able to take on this lumbering, untamed mass of information and whip it into submission?


One year ago, the Journal of AHIMA reported on the IBM su....

Author: Butler, Mary

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2015

Watch and learn. For clinical informaticist Nathan Patrick Taylor, MPH, MS, CHDA, and others like him, watching patient-physician encounters and learning from them is just as important as knowing how to query data in a health IT system. Because as technical as informatics can get, at its....

Author: Dolezel, Diane

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2015

The digital era of Big Data has generated a growing need for more electronic health information management (e-HIM) professionals who can assume the emerging role of data analyst.1 This new role requires learning how to analyze data and perform statistical calculations to support informed d....

Author: Butler, Mary

Source: Journal of AHIMA - website

Publication Date: April 2015

As health information management (HIM) professionals find themselves constantly inundated with more data, they will need to update their skills to stay on top of it. And one of the best ways to do just that is by earning AHIMA’s Certified Health Data Analyst (CHDA) credential.

Author: Butler, Mary

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: February 2015

American high school students approaching their senior year have good reason to envy their European counterparts who enjoy the more common experience of a “gap year” between high school and college.


A gap year, at least in Europe, is a socially accepted opportuni....

Author: Butler, Mary

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: January 2015

Human beings have been fascinated by birds—their flight patterns, colors, and songs—for centuries. In the ancient world, “augurs,” Roman practitioners of “augury,” looked for clues about the past and future by observing birds in flight, hoping for omens.....

Author: Butler, Mary

Source: Journal of AHIMA - website

Publication Date: November 2014

In the current US healthcare climate, panic and paranoia prevail as deadly diseases like Ebola and tuberculosis command public attention and the World Health (WHO) organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) work to provide relevant guidance. A....

Author: Wiedemann, Lou Ann

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: October 2014

Healthcare has become a data-rich field, and any data rich environment requires the ability to analyze large, complex data sets. The field of informatics provides tools to integrate data, information, knowledge, and wisdom when processing data. Good informatics includes many functions, and....

Author: AHIMA

Source: AHIMA toolkit

Publication Date: September 2014

The content in this toolkit has been updated. More recent information is available here.

Author: Fenton, Susan H.; Benigni, Mary Sue

Source: Perspectives in Health Information Management

Publication Date: July 2014

Abstract


The transition from ICD-9-CM to ICD-10-CM/PCS is expected to result in longitudinal data discontinuities, as occurred with cause-of-death in 1999. The General Equivalence Maps (GEMs), while useful for suggesting potential maps do not provide guidance regarding the frequen....

Author: Easterling, Sharon; Endicott, Melanie; Lojewski, Tedi; Maccariella-Hafey, Patricia C; Martin, Ginny

Source: Journal of AHIMA - Coding Notes | Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: July 2014

Clinical validation involves the clinical review of a case to determine whether or not the patient truly possesses the conditions documented in the health record. Productivity and coding quality often suffer when the health record lacks accurate documentation to support the claim, and cur....

Author: Wiedemann, Lou Ann

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: June 2014

There is a growing hunger in healthcare today for attaining meaningful data. It is no longer an option to sift through large amounts of data stored in a variety of systems, spending valuable man hours to produce information that can be utilized to make good business decisions. Allowing fo....

Author: Dooling, Julie A

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2014

Data are the assets that healthcare relies upon to provide needed information for making decisions and ultimately, hopefully, improving patient care. The volume of data collected today is staggering and continues to grow with the advent of electronic health records (EHRs). The healthcare d....

Author: Rubin, Joshua C; Friedman, Charles P

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2014

As the “Vision” section of AHIMA’s website states, AHIMA aims to “lead the advancement and ethical use of quality health information to promote health and wellness worldwide.” In many ways, the Learning Health System’s (LHS) overarching vision represents....

Author: Lee, Howard

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2014

When IBM announced that they were developing a supercomputing system called “Watson,” many fans of literary icon Sherlock Holmes thought of the London-based detective’s trusted friend Dr. John Watson—and not the computer’s actual namesake, IBM founder Thomas Watson. But the mistake isn’t....

Author: Viangteeravat, Teeradache; Rao Nagisetty, Naga Satya V

Source: Journal of AHIMA

Publication Date: May 2014

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from a manuscript published in the Winter 2014 issue of AHIMA’s quarterly scholarly research journal, Perspectives in Health Information Management, “Giving Raw Data a Chance to Talk: A Demonstration of Exploratory Visual Analytics with a Pe....