Articles
AHIMA Releases New Guidelines for Queries
published 2022-10-11
The updated guidelines were developed jointly by AHIMA and ACDIS.
The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), in collaboration with Simplify Compliance’s Association of Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists (ACDIS), jointly announced a highly anticipated preliminary update to their Guidelines to Achieving a Compliant Query Practice on October 10, 2022, at AHIMA22 Global Conference currently being held in Columbus, Ohio.
Tammy Combs, RN, MSN, CCS, CCDS, CDIP, Director of CDI and Clinical Foundations at AHIMA, and one of the lead authors, emphasized that several important issues are addressed in this update including query guidelines, query templates, provider education, previous encounter information, clinical indicators, who to query, how to query, query policies and procedures, and query technology, and other issues.
“Each of these issues were developed to support the query process across all healthcare settings.” Combs said in a news release announcing the brief. “Another important element discussed is the need for query compliance in all avenues of query delivery. This includes CDI and computer-generated queries.”
“I am glad that AHIMA and ACDIS have updated this practice brief to reflect CDI’s ongoing transition from “reactive” manual queries to “proactive” computer-generated automated queries and ICD-10-CM/PCS-sensitive electronic health record templates, especially with increasing payers and government scrutiny of how medical groups and facilities engaged providers in structuring or amending their documentation to fit the language required by ICD-10-CM/PCS,” noted James S. Kennedy, MD, president of CDIMD and a consultant to HITEKS, a computer-assisted provider documentation (CAPD) developer for which this brief is applicable.
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This article originally published on October 10, 2022 by ICD10monitor.
