Dolbey today announced its new add-on module to the inpatient portion of its Fusion CAC hospital coding system, providing the industry’s first automated Present on Admission (POA) solution. Dolbey, a software developer in the dictation, transcription, speech recognition and coding markets of healthcare will be offering the computer-assisted coding solutions with POA under the “Fusion CACTM Powered by EMscribe™” name. Fusion CAC is a second-generation computer aided coding solution that scans patient records for appropriate ICD9CM diagnostic and procedure codes and CPT codes using innovative language processing technology. The new POA module automatically determines whether a diagnosis was present at the time of admission and then generates the appropriate POA status. Currently, most hospitals determine POA status through a manual process. With Fusion CAC POA module, hospitals save time, money and manual effort while complying with the new regulations more efficiently. Reporting the POA status of diagnoses has been required by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, (CMS), since October 1, 2007. The Deficit Reduction Act of 2005 mandates that all US hospitals report POA information for secondary claims, creating at least two reduced payment diagnosis-related group, (DRGs), for all post-admitting infections. Hospitals currently are forced to have their HIM staff evaluate these new requirements by hand, filling out the forms and passing those forms to billing. Coders throughout the country are currently engaged in learning how to process the new POA indicators such as Y, N, W, U, and 1. “With our new automated POA module, an electronic system pre-evaluates those codes for them,” said Stuart Covit, executive vice president of Artificial Medical Intelligence Inc. “This is one less headache for hospital Health Information Management to worry about and allows for greater efficiency without the extra burden of filling out more forms.”
The automated POA module is currently live in several hospital systems, including Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, New Brunswick, New Jersey. According to Cecilia Hilerio, HIM Director at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, “Automated POA provides increased efficiency by providing seamless coder processing of our inpatient encounters through the Fusion CAC system.”
