By Brian D. Murphy

The end of the year and the holiday season is a time to reflect on accomplishments, and give thanks to the colleagues and friends who helped you produce good work and meet professional goals along the way. And the year 2016 will go down as a very productive one for the ACDIS advisory board—and one for which I am very grateful.

President-elect Donald Trump selected Republican Representative Tom Price, 62, an orthopedic surgeon from Georgia to head the Department of Health and Human Services and Seema Verma, founder of the Indiana health policy consulting firm SVC Inc., as his pick for administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, according to report from Bloomberg Politics.

The latest rollout of healthcare facility assessments expands the government’s Compare websites to  Inpatient Rehabilitation Facilities (IRFs) and Long-Term Care Hospitals (LTCHs), according to a December 14, CMS Blog post.

Ensuring hospital revenue integrity requires three operational pillars—clinical coding, CDI, and physician education, according to Kalispell (Montana) Regional Medical Center’s (KRMC), director of CDI services and ICD-10 project manager Christine Seager, RN, BSN, CCDS.

CMS made certain concessions from its proposed site-neutral payment policies required by Section 603 of the Bipartisan Budget Act, but it is still moving forward with implementation January 1, 2017, according to the 2017 OPPS final rule.

CMS released its list of quality measures under consideration (MUC) in November and the National Quality Forum’s (NQF) Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) begun its annual review of the list, according to a blog post from the American Association of Professional Coders (AAPC).

Q: Can you please help me determine the query opportunities and code assignment/sequencing argument related to a patient who was admitted with pneumonia, congestive heart failure, acute respiratory failure, and encephalopathy? I thought that the pneumonia would be the primary and the respiratory failure as secondary as the severity of illness/risk of mortality (SOI/ROM) as well as the MS-DRG would all increase. Yet, I'm getting some push back on this train of thought and I'm not sure where the error in my logic may be. Any insight you could offer would be much appreciated.