COVID’s Effects on Health Information Management
Whose life has not changed in some capacity due to COVID-19? The year has been nothing short of EPIC – and not the EHR, but the effect COVID-19 has had on life as we know it. Being close to a year into the pandemic, we will explore the ‘new normal.’
How have you been affected?
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Stay at home orders
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Mask mandates
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Social distancing
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Virtual school
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Remote work
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Economic collapse to economic gain for different sectors of business
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And so many others to add to this list…
For working adults ages 18 to 64 it is reported that 4 in 10 have worked from home due coronavirus concerns. Of those, working age adults with college degrees and higher-income earnings were at the majority having worked from home.
With one of Extract’s primary markets being healthcare, here are some specific attributes of COVID-19 to healthcare:
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Increase of telehealth services.
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Delayed and cancelled elective procedures.
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Overcrowded hospital beds and rooms.
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Patients being admitted without another adult (or loved one) present.
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Extraordinary financial pressure.
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2000 healthcare workers dead, and many thousands more infected.
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Changing policies and protocols daily, as new information learned each day about COVID-19.
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Leadership facing extraordinary financial pressure.
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And now, the distribution of vaccines to slow the pandemic, in the hope to reach herd immunity in 2021.
Within healthcare, specific departments tend to be on the front lines of data capture of patients’ medical records. Whether in a pandemic or not, Health Information Management (HIM) personnel are the data custodians responsible for managing patient information where healthcare is delivered. They provide collection analysis, storage, and protection of the quality of patient health information. The pandemic brought about a dilemma for Health Information professionals based on their pledge to uphold the privacy of patients, while providing the global data for research entities to understand the risks to the public. Unfortunately, many of these decisions were made without government strategy, as we worked through a highly politicized spectrum during an election year.
Health Information Management has been challenged with several factors specific to their profession in the past year. First, on April 1, 2020, the CDC adopted a new ICD code for COVID-19: ICD-10-CM code U07.1. Daily new regulations, protocols, and policies were being adopted. For example, many departments were forced to provide COVID-19 flow sheets to list specific dates regulations were put into place in case of audits. All this occurred while cutting hours, furloughing employees, having employees take PTO, cross training on new tasks, and working from home. Communication was integral between billing, IT, compliance, and HIM to minimize silos, especially for those employees working from home. The end goal of this was to provide accurate COVID-19 data.
The pandemic response has shown where further preparation is needed, and limitations were overlooked, providing new opportunities for the processing of patient health information in the future.
Sources:
https://journal.ahima.org/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-health-information-management/
