Medical Tagging: No Slam Dunk
May 28, 2015
The taxonomy/ontology/indexing professionals have a challenge. I am not sure many of the companies pitching better, faster, cheaper—no, strike that—better automated indexing of medical information will become too vocal about a flubbed layup.
Navigate to “Coalition for ICD 10 Responds to AMA.” It seems as if indexing what is a more closed corpus is a sticky ball of goo. The issue is the coding scheme required by everyone who wants to get reimbursed and retain certification.
The write up quotes a person who is supposed to be in the know:
“We’d see 13,000 diagnosis codes balloon into 68,000 – a five-fold increase.” [Dr. Robert Wah of the AMA]
The idea is that the controlled terms are becoming obese, weighty, and frankly sufficiently numerous to require legions of subject matter experts and software a heck of a lot more functional than Watson to apply “correctly.” I will let you select the definition of “correctly” which matches your viewpoint from this list of Beyond Search possibilities:
- Health care administrators: Get paid
- Physicians: Avoid scrutiny from any entity or boss
- Insurance companies: Pay the least possible amount yet have an opportunity for machine assisted claim identification for subrogation
- Patients: Oh, I forgot. The patients are of lesser importance.
You, gentle reader, are free to insert your own definition.
I circled this statement as mildly interesting:
As to whether ICD-10 will improve care, it would seem obvious that more precise data should lead to better identification of potential quality problems and assessment of provider performance. There are multiple provisions in current law that alter Medicare payments for providers with excess patient complications. Unfortunately, the ICD-9 codes available to identify complications are woefully inadequate. If a patient experiences a complication from a graft or device, there is no way to specify the type of graft or device nor the kind of problem that occurred. How can we as a nation assess hospital outcomes, pay fairly, ensure accurate performance reports, and embrace value-based care if our coded data doesn’t provide such basic information? Doesn’t the public have a right to know this kind of information?
Maybe. In my opinion, the public may rank below patients in the priorities of some health care delivery outfits, professionals, and advisers.
Indexing is necessary. Are the codes the ones needed? In an automatic indexing system, what’s more important: [a] Generating revenue for the vendor; [b] Reducing costs to the customer of the automated tagging system; [c] Making the indexing look okay and good enough?
Stephen E Arnold, May 28, 2015
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Medical Tagging: No Slam Dunk : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search