AHIMA develops QA resource kit

Two professional associations have partnered to create a resource kit that addresses healthcare organizations' need for quality assurance (QA) programs.

The absence of a QA program in EHR documentation processes can compromise patient care and safety, revenue cycle management and risk management, according to a release from the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) and the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI).

To help healthcare organizations focus on the integrity of patient documentation, AHIMA and AHDI created a resource kit--Clinician-Created Documentation: Reinstating Quality Assurance Programs to Safeguard Patients and Providers--that provides the tools needed to implement a QA program.

The kit offers standards for measurement, reporting and documentation improvement that will help promote accuracy in patient records.

"Having a QA program is an essential component to ensuring patient safety," said AHIMA CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon, MBA, RHIA. "AHIMA and AHDI urge healthcare organizations to reinstate QA programs as part of a comprehensive plan that focuses on quality health information."

QA differs from clinical documentation improvement in that it facilitates accurate representation of a patient's clinical status that translates into coded data, while a QA program is the complete review of the narrative and demographic data to protect the patient, caregiver and the organization's document integrity, according to the organizations.