Thursday, December 31, 2009

Healthcare standards: how you know they blew it

You only need to know one thing to know that the frenetic healthcare standards efforts failed ...
Life as a Healthcare CIO: The Interim Final Rule on Standards
... The adopted vocabulary standards for procedures are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (i.e.,ICD-9-CM) or CPT-4. The candidate standards are the applicable HIPAA code set required by law (e.g.,ICD-10-CM) or CPT-4...
CPT. Fully owned by the AMA, CPT is a rough collection of work descriptions sometimes loosely related to procedures. It's not a vocabulary, it's not a classification, and it has no stable semantics.

The adoption of CPT as a healthcare "standard" is not the only sign of failure, but it is the most telling sign.

No comments: