VitalCoder by VitalWare is a new technology designed to help medical billers and coders ditch their paper ICD-10 manuals.
Instead of searching through paper references and the CMS website for coding information, coders can receive coding, financial and regulatory updates in real-time. The secret is VitalWare's Sherpa proprietary medical ontology engine.
To philosophers, ontology is the metaphysical study of being, becoming, existence and reality. For information management professionals, ontology is the conceptualization of a subject area by dividing it into segments such as individuals, classes, attributes and relations.
Artificial intelligence researchers, for example, build ontological computational models in which the classification of and relationships between bits of information enable automated reasoning. Sherpa groups similar medical concepts into categories so that medical practices can more easily choose the appropriate codes.
For example, instead of generating a single code when a biller searches for a medical condition, Sherpa uses ontological processing to produce multiple related options that can describe a patient's position more accurately.
In addition to organizing medical content for billers, VitalCoder includes a MyAdvisor knowledge base in which industry coding experts answer user-generated questions. The add-on benchmarking/peer comparison module allows medical practices to compare their prices to those of defined peer groups.
With VitalCoder, all necessary information regarding a query is presented in a single-screen format. Users can explore payment information, coding guidelines, modifiers, related codes and wage-adjusted tables without toggling. They can also save their screenshots in case they need to access the information later.
ICD-10 officially takes effect on Oct. 1, 2014. However, a July 2013 survey from the American Academy of Family Physicians found that only 4.8 percent of medical practices had made significant progress toward getting ready for ICD-10.
Many practices are concerned about losing efficiency during the transition. They are also concerned about technology costs. For a 10-doctor practice, upgrading a practice management system and electronic health record solution for ICD-10 would cost an estimated $201,000.
Edited by
Alisen Downey
