A community of 30,000 US Transcriptionist serving Medical Transcription Industry
We are being QA'ed into oblivion at our facility. We have our RAC audits, our internal QA, and an outside agency that does QA audits on each coder. We are constantly in a QA cycle for someone, and it is getting to be so tiring. Each reviewer sees things a little differently so one thing may be correct for our internal QA but an error for our external. Can't win. Anyway, I am currently doing outpatient coding. Our facility uses EpicCare for clinical documentation. What I would like to know from those of you who might do any outpatient coding, do you pick up all chronic conditions or do you code only those conditions which were addressed at a particular visit or may have had an effect on the treatment rendered at that visit? I generally code only that which is addressed, and for our internal QA this has always been correct. Now an external reviewer is counting these as errors if we don't pick up all chronic conditions. The guidelines for OP coding say "code all documents conditions that coexist at the time of the encounter/visit and require or affect patient care, treatment or management." I read that to say I don't need to code all those other chronic conditions if they are not addressed/treated. I am wondering how others do it.