Harmony Insight

It’s been a little over 2 years since the United States’ Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) awarded a cooperative agreement to the Sequoia Project to oversee part of its Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) project. As the Recognized Coordinating Entity (REC) of the project, the Sequoia Project is responsible for developing, updating, implementing and maintaining the Common Agreement component of the TEFCA and operationalizing the Qualified Health Information Network (QHIN) designation and monitoring process.  As a non-profit dedicated to solving health IT interoperability challenges, the Sequoia Project has been busy recently. On September…

If you’re not familiar with every section of the Social Security Act of 1935, you’re most likely not alone. It was signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on August 14, 1935, and it has undergone multiple amendments, with thousands of pages and sections added to it. One of those sections, Section 1886(d), specifies that the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) establish a classification system (referred to as DRGs) for inpatient discharges and adjust payments under the Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) based on appropriate weighting factors assigned to each DRG. Through the IPPS, the Centers for…

It’s hard to believe summer is almost over. Many students are back in school, the football season has kicked off, and temperatures in most of the country are slowly getting cooler. For healthcare providers and payers, the beginning of fall means it’s only a few weeks until October 1 when the fiscal year (FY) 2022 ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting go into effect. Released on July 12, somewhat earlier than in years past, these codes are to be utilized for discharges and patient encounters occurring from October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022. Although the FY 2022 codes mostly only include…