Time is seriously weird stuff. 2020 so far has had that dream/nightmare quality that is somehow fast and slow at the same time. My memory of February, only four months […]

Classification systems like ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS are all about trade-offs—balancing the ongoing need for new levels of detail with the increasing complexity of the classification. PCS has its own unique […]

Way back in the early days of ICD-10-PCS development, “root operation” was defined as “the objective of the procedure.” As definitions go, “the objective of the procedure” is about a […]

For those of us facing “maturity,” when we were growing up the year 2020 seemed an impossibly exotic thing, the stuff of science fiction. Time has flown like a freaking […]

AHA Coding Clinic’s Editorial Advisory Board (EAB) held its two-day winter session in February, and I participate on the EAB as part of 3M’s contract with CMS. As I was […]

Geek alert: If you are one of those people who don’t want to know how sausages and legislation are made, you may want to skip this blog. It is pretty […]

In my most recent blog, I discussed in general why the capacity of ICD-10-PCS has limits, and how multi-axial structure and hierarchy together define those limits. This time I’m going […]

At the March C&M meeting, we heard the heartening report that people no longer get all in a dither about the number of ICD-10 codes. That is super good news. […]

Coding is fundamentally a balancing act, a delicate, high-wire dance intended to get useful data from the medical record that can be widely shared in health care. It happens at […]

In my last blog, I talked about the trade-offs between lumping and splitting as they apply to the annual update of the ICD-10-CM/PCS classification systems. This time I am going […]

You may have heard the terms lumping and splitting applied to medical records coding, or maybe to the analysis of coded data. Whether we’re producing coded data or analyzing it, […]

The ICD-10-PCS FY 2018 update was posted on the CMS website in the second half of May, and contains the changes to PCS that go into effect on October 1. […]