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Healthcare: A Challenging yet Promising Market for India

Gopi Natarajan
Monday, July 12, 2010
 Gopi Natarajan
The recent healthcare reforms announced in the U.S. have arguably been one of the most opportunistic business areas that Indian services industry can look forward to. While the quality of healthcare in the US is arguably one of the best in the world, the administrative aspects of the industry is by far the most complex and difficult to comprehend systems and processes in the world. The healthcare industry currently represents about 12 percent of the US GDP and is expected to reach close to 15 percent over the next 7-8 years. Traditionally, the administrative side of the healthcare industry has been termed the laggard when it comes to technology adoption, and the IT spend is estimated to be about two percent of revenues compared to the financial or banking industries where it is about 8 to 10 percent.

Trends

There is a major reason why technology adoption is difficult in the administrative side of the healthcare industry; it is the regulatory complexities involved. Most IT companies have found it difficult to build systems that are able to handle the ever changing federal, state, and private insurance regulations. There is a lot of work that has to be done manually in order to keep the monies flowing between the various constituents. While this trend has been changing over the years, it will still take a very long time for systems to catch up and replace the amount of manual work that will always be needed.

It is anticipated that over the next few years the amount of data entry work will probably reduce, as systems get more sophisticated and data transfer between the various systems become more seamless. Regardless of this, the need for value added services like medical coding, insurance follow-up, collection activities, and claims adjudication services will continue to increase. The healthcare reform package recently announced by President Obama, which is considered the most sweeping change in the industry since the Medicare changes in the 1960’s, has some challenges to overcome in terms of financing the various programs and reforms that have been announced.

In any event, some form of the reform is much needed in the industry and will go into effect only over the next 3 to 5 years, and will add more than 40 million Americans (who currently don’t have insurance) to the insurance system. This will increase the magnitude and scope of the administrative complexity, thus leading to more manual work that has to be performed. In addition, the US has mandated that the entire industry move from ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases) to the usage of ICD-10 codes throughout. This move to the ICD-10 coding system is forecast to be as big as the Y2K opportunity. Thousands of companies in the industry will have to make changes to their systems and processes to accommodate this transition. For example, there is a total of over 16,000 ICD-9 codes while the number of ICD-10 codes are about 64,000 and more.


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Reader's comments(1)
1:The traditional emphasis in medical records management around the world has been on what data to get, and not on how to get it. The more efficient health information systems of today, however, are interested in what data to get, how to get it, and how to synthesize these data into an understanding of the patient\'s total situation. Disease classification and coding is the principal tool used by medical records personnel to accomplish this, and is, therefore a skill, which the effective healthcare managers, medical records administrators, clinical statisticians, statistical technicians, and medical transcriptionists also must master. This book is designed to present the principles that will help the learner to acquire or improve that skill. The roots of the book go back to the teaching of ICD coding to doctors, medical records personnel and statistical technicians at the Department of Statistics & Medical Records, Ministry of Health, Kuwait for over two decades. While teaching the principles and techniques of disease coding through various revisions of the ICD we came across many areas which were not within easy reach of our students, leading to frustration among them. This led us to bring out this comprehensive guidebook on ICD-10 coding with detailed explanations, suitable examples and appropriate coding exercises for better comprehension. The book is divided into eight units. Unit 1 provides an introduction to disease coding. Unit 2 gives a brief history of the development of ICD Units 3 and 4 deal with the main classification and alphabetic index of ICD-10. Unit 5 explains the principles and techniques of using ICD-10 and Unit 6 does this on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Units 7 and 8 consider the special features of morbidity and mortality coding. Unit 9 emphasizes the various aspects of statistical presentation in accordance with the WHO regulations. Care has been taken all through these units to keep the matter as simple as possible. Appropriate examples are provided wherever needed. Suitable exercises are presented at the end of each unit, which the students can take to test their level of comprehension before embarking on to the next unit. Many people have contributed to this final product. Of these, special mention should be made of Dr. Abdul Aziz Khalaf, Director of Statistics & Medical Records Department at the Ministry of Health, Kuwait for his continuous support and encouragement. We are deeply indebted to Miss Zahra Awadh who reviewe d most of the chapters and made many helpful contributions to both style and content; and to Mr. Mohamed Bader and Mrs. Jaya Umaputhiran for secretarial assistance. We are especially grateful to hundreds of doctors, medical records administrators and technicians, health statisticians, and ICD coders who participated in our training programmes and workshops on ICD in Kuwait and other countries during the past 25 years. We trust that these many colleagues will find our account of some small value.
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Practice -Dhirendra-Mohamed-El-Sayed/dp/8190381229/ref =sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278243726&sr=1-1
Posted by: Karunesh Kumar Agrawal - 04th Jul 2010
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