Many Clinicians Still Doing the Coding

In our recent survey of home care professionals about ICD-10 conversion, we asked who at your organization was doing the medical coding. Results showed that 23 percent of home care agencies still have clinicians assigning and sequencing diagnosis.

While this number seems to be slowly declining, it is still far too high. The problem with clinicians doing coding is that their main focus should be on patient care. They are dealing with compliance issues that relate to patient care, and shouldn’t be worried about coding compliance issues as well. Clinicians are also not certified and typically receive little orientation training on how to properly assign codes. This means more room for error and potential for inaccurate payments.

Coding in the home health arena is complex. Home health care coders must gather information for coding from multiple sources, be familiar with inpatient procedure codes, late effect codes, and know how to read discharge information, rehab reports and more. Home health coders are also responsible for coding both acute and post-acute diagnoses. On top of everything a clinician is doing every day to care for patients, this can be overwhelming and detrimental to agencies.

On top of these current challenges, these clinicians will have to learn a whole set of new codes for ICD-10 conversion. Significant time and costs will need to be allocated to get these clinicians properly educated on the new system. There is also a greater chance of decreased productivity if clinicians are wearing both hats. Our ICD-10 survey revealed 57% of people thought conversion would cause a decrease in productivity, with an average decrease lasting seven months. With clinicians doing coding, this could significantly increase the length of decreased productivity.

The benefits of lifting the burden off of clinicians and hiring coders or a remote coding firm are plenty. More accurate payments. Better patient care. Improved compliance. Less burn out on employees. Peace of mind.

And with ICD-10 approaching, what better time to make the switch?

How to Work With Us

Daymarck is Pain-Free Coding

We want to make it easy for you to work with us. This is why we have established simple methods to help with your coding needs. Read below to find out what we need from you to ensure accurate and efficient coding.

What we need
To ensure accurate ICD-9 codes to be assigned, the following information is required: 

1. Referral information (i.e. why patient was referred to homecare)
2. OASIS/Comprehensive Assessment 
3. Care Plan (it can be a draft) 
4.  Medication list at the time of the assessment

Additional Information that helps us accurately code: 

1. History and Physicals
2.  Hospital Treatment Notes
3.  Discharge Notes 
4. Therapy Evaluations

It is also very important to NOT send irrelevant information such as maps, driving directions, and blank pages. By eliminating those types of non-pertinent information, we are able to maintain a quick turnaround time and keep your costs low.

How we get the data

The quickest and most cost effective way, as far as time, fees and production, is one pdf file uploaded for each patient or case that needs coded. But we know that isn’t possible for every agency or situation. Talk to us and we can come up with a solution that works for you.

Here are a few ways our clients send us the data:

• Run a few reports and put them together using Adobe Acrobat Pro or Standard or similar pdf creator.
•  Scan the paper and bind it together in one pdf file with the reports they ran out of their system.
•  Give Daymarck remote access into their electronic system via VPN or other remote access methods and we run the reports and create the patient document (additional fees do apply).
•  We accept faxes. Agencies who are on paper or prefer to print everything can then fax us patient documentation and it drops right into our system.
• And, lastly, some agencies use a mix of both methods - they fax us a couple pages with a cover page and then we can remote in and get the info out of their system.

8th Annual Home Health Coding Summit

This week August 8-12, for the second year in a row, Daymarck is a sponsor at the 8th Annual Home Health Coding Summit, the gold standard in coding education. The summit is being held at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel for the chance to network with fellow clinicians and coders. Check out our photos of the booth and who we are meeting.

Pictured here is Nick with Kathy Domenz, one of the first home care certified (HCS-D) coders at the program's inception in 2003.

Pain-Free and Easy Video

Watch this simple video and then sign up here for more information. Get your first TEN coding events FREE.


Daymarck Remote Home Health Coding Services and Software from Daymarck Coding on Vimeo.

What Agencies Must Do to Survive

Home Care Leadership: What Agencies Must Do to Survive
By: Nick Dobrzelecki, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Daymarck
January 2010

As the debate over health care reform continues, home health agencies are facing an increasingly complex array of rules and guidelines that will dramatically reshape future business operations.

For many agencies, the new rules and guidelines can seem daunting. Recently, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released the Final Rule updating the policies and rates associated with the Medicare home health prospective payment system (HH-PPS) for calendar year (CY) 2010.  In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of the Inspector General (OIG) has released its Work Plan for the fiscal year 2010, describing the areas and issues that the OIG will audit, evaluate and inspect in the coming year.

Home Health Code Pro Software at NAHC 2009

While at the 2009 National Association for Home Care Expo in Los Angeles, Daymarck announced how its Home Health Code Pro software helps providers improve compliance and accuracy. Read the press release in the Daymarck News/Events section of their web site.

Demo at Decision Health Coding Summit

View more Daymarck videos on DaymarckTV on YouTube.

Home Care Coding Leader Judy Adams

View more Daymarck videos on DaymarckTV on YouTube.