Healthcare IT Update

Occupational Therapy Gets Its Own EMR Tool

Occupational therapists are getting some special electronic medical record attention. For a while now, speech pathologists and physical therapists have had the option to use tailored electronic medical record and documentation programs from their national associations — and now it’s occupational therapy’s turn. The American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA) announced in early November a licensing agreement with Cedaron Medical, Inc. to develop an electronic patient record and documentation system for the occupational therapy profession.

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EHR: Show Your Physicians What’s In It For Them

Drop the paper chart, Tiger. If the clinicians at your hospital or health system are carping about your EHR system’s learning curve, here’s one way to win their buy-in. Show them how your EHR can reduce denials for their reimbursement on the Part B side. An EHR can eradicate a common reason physicians get denials for Part B services in Part A settings — a missing chief complaint, explains Jules Enatsky, RT, BSN, CPC-H, a senior consultant with JA Thomas & Associates. When several different specialists are seeing a hospital patient, for example, they begin their notes by commenting how the patient is responding to a treatment or medication, without documenting why the patient is being treated, Enatsky writes in The Coding Edge. “If an admitting physician and one or two consulting providers all bill subsequent inpatient care…

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