The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic reached nearly every industry in the economy, but none more directly than healthcare.

Even as the pandemic subsides in many parts of the United States, healthcare organizations will be facing new challenges. Many people postponed visits and elective procedures in order to maintain physical distancing guidelines and avoid potentially crowded medical facilities, and these appointments are already coming back up.

While frontline medical staff bore the brunt of the pandemic, support and administrative staff have also been stretched thin and faced increased pressure over the past two years. One behind-the-scenes process that plays a critical role in maintaining a functioning healthcare industry is Health Information Management (HIM).

Why is HIM so important?

To understand the importance of HIM, it helps to start by defining what’s meant by “health information.” Simply put, any data pertaining to an individual’s medical history - from reported symptoms, to diagnoses and procedures, to lab results and X-rays, to clinical information and physician’s notes. Anything that helps track the patient’s health over time from any interaction with a healthcare provider goes into their health record.

Accurate health records provide doctors with valuable context for a patient’s condition and leads to better diagnoses and better health outcomes for the patient. On a larger scale, extensive health records for entire populations offer a bird’s-eye view of larger health trends and can help inform policy decisions.

Health information management is the critical process of acquiring, analyzing, and securing medical information.

What is Medical Coding?

The American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) defines medical coding as “the transformation of healthcare diagnosis, procedures, medical services, and equipment into universal medical alphanumeric codes.” In layman’s terms, it means translating complicated medical information into a widely-accepted shorthand.

Every time you see a healthcare provider, they review your condition, along with your medical history, and determine what they think the issue is and how to treat it. Accurate medical coding of this information is important not only to maintain reliable patient health records, but also to ensure the hospital, clinic, practice, or other healthcare provider receives proper payment.

Why Outsource Medical Coding?

Medical coding is a critical function for any healthcare provider - but it can also be time consuming. That’s why many providers partner with experienced and dependable medical coding companies like LexiCode to handle the task of medical coding, allowing healthcare professionals to focus on patient care.

In heavily-regulated and complex fields like HIM, where compliance is a constant concern, it helps to have dedicated experts in your corner. With over 39 years of coding and auditing experience, LexiCode’s team of seasoned HIM and medical coding specialists help healthcare organizations of all sizes maintain efficient coding practices and improve their coding efficiency while reducing administrative costs.

LexiCode maintains a distributed, global workforce of credentialed coders, which makes them better able to scale up operations in times of heightened demand, and stay productive even in the face of unexpected regional disasters. 

What do Medical Coders do?

Medical coders are the ones who actually do the work of converting complex medical information into predetermined alphanumeric codes, and ensure that these codes are accurate for the medical billing process. In most cases, they’re also responsible for creating insurance claims for the healthcare provider, so accuracy and attention to detail are critical.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “they might review patient information for preexisting conditions, such as diabetes, to ensure proper coding of patient data. They also work as the liaison between healthcare providers and billing offices.” This access to medical information is part of why medical coders must get special training and certifications before landing the job.

How to Become a Medical Coder

Medical coding is an important role in a highly-regulated industry, so getting hired takes a little legwork. The growing demand and high-value skills you’ll develop make it well worth the effort. In order to become a medical coder, you have to get specialized training and a certification from the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).

While getting through the requisite coursework and passing the certification exam may take some time, it’s still considerably less time than it would take to get into other healthcare jobs. Plus, there are many online course options, which can offer more flexibility, allowing you to work at your own pace and when it works for your busy schedule.

Once you’ve completed an accredited medical coding training program, you can take the Certified Coding Associate (CCA) or Certified Coding Specialist (CCS) exam through AHIMA.

To get started on your Medical Coding journey, check out the courses available through LexiCode: https://learn.lexicode.com/

As vaccines roll out across the world and cities and countries begin to lift restrictions and open up, it may seem like the world is ready to move on. However, the healthcare industry in particular will continue to face new challenges and unexpected, long-lasting impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic that will take time and innovation to recover from. 

In order to bounce back from such an unprecedented event, the medical industry is going to need to find ways to improve efficiency without cutting corners or lowering standards. Digital transformation technology offers a lot of opportunities for just that. By enabling automation of mundane and repetitive tasks, centralizing communication, and making information more readily accessible across vast distances, digital technology is revolutionizing the way business is done, and may hold the key to getting the healthcare industry back on track post-pandemic.

A full-scale digital transformation can be a massive undertaking, so it often helps to break it down into more manageable parts. Digitizing paper documents and paper-driven processes is an excellent place to start.

Efficient and effective management of documents and records helps any organization run more smoothly. While improving this function can make a big difference in nearly any industry, it can have particularly positive impacts when it comes to organizing medical records. Here are a few reasons to start digitizing medical records:

Paper Digitization Offers Better Security

There are a wide variety of medical documents, including many that are considered highly confidential. Hard copy paper documents can lead to unnecessary security risks that digital documents more easily avoid. Paper documents can easily be mislabeled, incorrectly filed, lost, accidentally destroyed in fires or floods, or accessed by unauthorized individuals without a trace. Digitizing documents allows you to put in place strict security measures that limit access and visibility to only those with proper authorization, while also facilitating easy document search and lookup. Digital documents also have the added benefit of being able to track everyone who views, accesses, or changes the document, creating a reliable audit trail.

Greater Accessibility with Digital Documents

When dealing with a large volume of records, even meticulously organized for optimized retrieval, locating and accessing the specific information you’re looking for will always be needlessly time consuming. Navigating a well-designed digital document management system is going to be easier and more efficient. You can store records, define a standardized naming format, and find files more quickly.

Paper digitization also helps with legibility - a particular concern for the medical community in which ensuring prescriptions and dosages are correct can be a matter of life and death. Advance AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent character recognition (ICR) software is capable of extracting data from even handwritten documents - or alerting user if writing is too illegible and may cause confusion.

Reduced Storage Space

One thing the pandemic made abundantly clear for many health networks is the true value and importance of floorspace in healthcare facilities. A single sheet of paper may not seem to take up much space, but when dealing with the volumes most medical facilities see, that space fills up very quickly. By digitizing historical documents as well as newly created ones, medical facilities can cut down significantly on the amount of floorspace dedicated to document storage and reallocate it for better, more productive use. Maintaining physical records also often requires full-time help. Someone needs to be there to retrieve files, move them from locations, and maintain their organization. Digital document management solutions automate this task, making it faster, more efficient, and more consistent.

The healthcare industry has been slow to adopt some digital technologies, and not without good reason. But in order to bounce back from the unprecedented hit it took during the global pandemic, it’s time for the industry to invest in long term solutions that improve efficiency. By creating a smoother and faster administrative function, healthcare workers can focus more time and energy on their core mission - providing excellent patient care.

Digitization technology like Exela’s IntelliScan line of production scanners offer a great starting point for transforming paper documents into fully digital assets quickly and accurately. Find out more about how Exela’s digitization solutions can help your healthcare organization.

It’s easy to let negative thoughts take over during such a strange and scary time. As we navigate our way through the COVID-19 pandemic staying positive is not as easy as it used to be. Nations are quarantined. People are sick. Essential workers are tired. If you’re feeling negative don’t worry, because you are not alone. Here are a few ways our human resources professionals advise us to try to stay positive and get us through this pandemic:

1. Lean on Your Support System: whether it is friends and family, coworkers, a therapist  or an online community, reach out to those who support you. Everyone is in the same boat right now so finding people experiencing the same feelings as you is not difficult. Those that support you can help talk you through these negative emotions and help you develop healthy and positive coping mechanisms.
2. Have Gratitude: Being thankful is an easy way to pull yourself out of a downward spiral. Take a minute each day to write down what you are most grateful for. This will help you reflect on your blessings and inspire positive thoughts.
3. Help Others: Helping others is an easy way to instantly feel better. Whether you are sewing masks at home, delivering groceries for an at-risk relative or checking in via FaceTime on your friends, helping out will boost your serotonin levels and increase your positive outlook.
4. Create Something: Creative expression is known to boost not only your mood,  but also your confidence. Start cooking, painting, writing or whatever it is that makes you happy. I mean why not? We’ve all got a little extra time on our hands.

Even though this is a scary and unprecedented time, we can all try to be a bit more positive. Positivity is contagious, so rather than spreading negativity around, let’s all do our part to make positivity go viral.

As of April 2, 2020, COVID-19 has infected 956,588 people and killed 48,320^[1]. Hoping to contain the spread, the World Health Organization declared a “pandemic,” leading myriad companies to institute remote work. Many companies were unprepared. Even those with existing remote infrastructure were not necessarily ready for a scenario in which literally no one is in the office.

Nevertheless, Exela remains optimistic this great remote-work experiment will succeed. That’s because solutions ensuring business continuity even with no one in the office already exist. In fact, they’re integral to Exela’s Smart Office suite of solutions, which many of our customers had already been using prior to the pandemic. Smart Office automates a variety of office processes, enhancing efficiency, productivity, and security and setting the scene for seamless remote work. Exela’s Smart Office is comprised of a selection of data-driven solutions--some front-office, some back-office, all of which are aimed at creating and supporting a more efficient, productive, and sustainable workplace. These include, among others:

• Digital Mailroom, which transforms paper mail into digital format, securely routing it to its intended recipient(s) anywhere with an internet connection.
• PrintShop, which prints and copies documents remotely on-demand and securely routes them to their intended recipients.
• Intelligent Lobby, which eliminates the need for staffed reception spaces and allows office access without unnecessary, and risky, interaction.

Over the next several days and weeks to come, we will be addressing these and other Exela Smart Office solutions and how they can help your office retain business continuity in these uncertain times. As you work through the current global crisis, please be aware that the best remedy currently known for COVID-19 is prevention. Here are the CDC’s best practices for prevention. And please do not hesitate to contact us at covidresponse@exelatech.com, and let us know if we can assist you in any way.

[1]  https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

"Don’t fall for claims about remedies that will immunize or cure you of the disease,” warns the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Instead, practice prevention. Here is exactly what the CDC advises you to do in that regard: [1]

Avoid close contact

• Avoid close contact with people who are sick.
• Put distance between yourself and other people if COVID-19 is spreading in your community. This is especially important for older adults, cancer survivors, and people with other serious chronic conditions.
• Avoid crowded locations like malls, theaters, and sports venues.

Keep your hands clean

• Wash your hands often with soap and water for at least 20 seconds especially after you have been in a public place, or after blowing your nose, coughing, or sneezing.
• If soap and water are not readily available, use a hand sanitizer that contains at least 60% alcohol. Cover all surfaces of your hands and rub them together until they feel dry.
• Avoid touching your eyes, nose, and mouth with unwashed hands.

Avoid touching high-touch surfaces in public places—elevator buttons, door handles, handrails, handshaking with people, etc. Use a tissue or your sleeve to cover your hand or finger if you must touch something

We know that all of you are also preoccupied with this pandemic. As you work through this situation, please do not hesitate to contact us at covidresponse@exelatech.com and let us know if we can assist you in any way.

[1] https://blogs.cdc.gov/cancer/2020/03/16/best-remedy-for-covid-19-is-prevention/?deliveryName=USCDC_9_13-DM22702

If you’ve been reading the Exela Blog lately, you probably already recognize how fundamental information management is to solving healthcare’s costly inefficiencies. As we discuss in the 7 Layers of Digital Transformation, properly leveraging information management is akin to properly pouring the foundation when building a skyscraper. But just as identifying, sourcing, and accumulating all your building materials is a necessary first step before you can pour your foundation, data aggregation is a prerequisite for data management.

Data aggregation often involves some level of data digitization.

Depending on where you’re at along your digital transformation journey, data aggregation may rely heavily on the digitization of paper documentation. One of the most reliable methods is via scanner. It’s for that reason Exela offers scanning solutions, tailored to the precise needs of our customers, wherever they are on the digital transformation journey. In some cases, our customers go so far as to engage us to take over their scanning workflow altogether for a completely streamlined end-to-end solution. That’s precisely what we did for a global pharmaceutical company, with the end result being not only better control, more efficient document management, and more streamlined adherence to applicable privacy rules and regulations, but also a vast reduction in how much the company relied on paper documentation. 

The mailroom is a logical place to start, or accelerate, data aggregation.

Scanning is an important part of our Digital Mailroom solutions. As with scanning, we’re sometimes engaged to take over entire front-end mail operations in order to enable our customers to shift or maintain their focus on their core, revenue-generating work. Such was the case with a leading insurance payer, which came to Exela when its outdated mail facilities and processes were beginning to have a measurable negative impact on revenues. Exela’s solution was to relocate, reorganize, and re-equip the company’s mail operations, and the results were dramatic, resulting in vastly improved service levels alongside a 30% cost reduction per year. In some cases, we provide digital mailroom services in conjunction with other mailroom management services.

For healthcare payers, claims ingestion is another logical entry-point

Similarly, omni-channel claims ingestion offers a logical point of entry for data into the payer workflow. A common and significant payer pain-point involves the volume and variety of forms in which provider and patient claims enter their workflow. Our claims processing and adjudication solutions unify data from all incoming communication channels and perform pre-submission checks to create clean claims and intelligently route claims for optimal processing. For example, for a large healthcare claims processing center, our OpenBox platform streamlined the claims-intake process by automating the sorting and routing of inbound claims based on artificial intelligence technologies that were trained to identify, sort, and route claims according to form as well as content.

Medical coding doesn’t have to be a burden

HIPAA established the coding scenario that has proven a burden to many industry players, but the intention was streamlining operations. Streamlining operations is the goal of Exela’s coding services. Offered through LexiCode, an Exela brand devoted to providing innovative health information management solutions that drive reimbursement, such services are designed to improve coding quality and minimize compliance risk, can be performed for you or alongside you in a variety of settings, for both payers and providers. Such services can be provided remotely, as they were for one of our large medical center customers. can also train your staff to code accurately and in compliance with HIPAA and other applicable regulations.

What comes next?

With health information management underway, there is a perfect opportunity to turn information contained in EHRs into strategic planning, billing and collections, marketing, and communications assets. Our data analytics solutions include, among others:

• Predictive Analytics
• Data Visualization Tools
• Liquidity Management
• Security and Compliance Monitoring
• Omni-Channel Communications
• Hyper-Targeted Marketing

In our next post, we’ll be exploring how we take health information management to the next level via automation. Can’t wait? Check out the full story in our Q4 Edition of PluggedIN: Tell Us Where It Hurts: How Tech Can Heal Healthcare.

Get PluggedIN Now