The right code can mean the difference between a properly paid medical bill and a bad-debt-inducing nightmare.
With that in mind, Aprima Medical Systems has announced a partnership with Intelligent Medical Objects to give its physician practice customers access to IMO's broad range of coding and terminology solutions, including IMO Problem IT and IMO Procedure IT.
"This relationship allows Aprima to provide our customers with the most advanced medical lexicon available so they can improve coding and minimize the number of denied claims," said Neil Simon, chief operating officer of Dallas-based Aprima, formerly known as iMedica, in an Oct. 6 press release. "IMO was able to integrate its software into our solution, offering our physicians immediate expansion on their coding capability, without workflow interruption. In addition, since we want prospects to sample the IMO functionality, we established a page on our Web site where it can be evaluated for free."
Physicians rely on the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM) to classify their diagnoses for billing purposes. ICD-9 codes are organized in categories, giving the physician roughly 15,000 medical terms to describe a patient's condition – and, conversely, 14,999 chances to use the wrong term. In addition, all physicians are expected to migrate to the more complete – and complicated – ICD-10 codes by October 2013.
Officials say physicians using Aprima's electronic health record platform will have access to IMO's database of synonyms, acronyms, eponyms, abbreviations and common misspellings of medical conditions, allowing them to match the diagnosis with the appropriate code. IMO updates its database 10 times a year.
"With IMO, Aprima is able to make 180,000-plus terms available to its physician customers, enabling them to capture physician intent for patient problem lists, past medical history and assessments. This allows for enhanced documentation as well as coding for billing and outcome analysis," said Frank Naeymi-Rad, president and chief executive officer of Northbrook, Ill.-based IMO. "With an all-inclusive terminology bank, a common ground for health vocabulary is created among researcher, pharmacist, patient, physician and reimbursement services, allowing for seamless communication of medical information and maximized focus on patient care as well as coding compliance."
"With this service, practicing clinician users will appreciate finding and using the terms that they want for clinical documentation," added Amy Y. Wang, IMO's chief medical officer.
In addition, she said, IMO Problem IT's maps to SNOMED CT support the federal government's efforts to enhance "meaningful use" of healthcare IT, as defined by the National Library of Medicine and the International Health Terminology Standards Development Organization's first version of the Clinical Observations Recording and Encoding (CORE) subset of SNOMED CT.