MTIA Becomes CDIA, and an eBook for Medical Coders

In March 2011 the Medical Transcription Industry Association (MTIA) officially became the Clinical Documentation Industry Association (CDIA), to reflect the group’s envisioned expanded role beyond medical transcription, editing, voice, and speech recognition. CDIA said that its new involvement now addresses every point in clinical documentation, including medical billing and coding training, pharmacy technician classes, and medical transcription training,

The new name is an adaptation to the evolution of the industry, now pulled beyond its original form by technological change and outsourcing. According to CDIA, the overwhelming majority of the businesses doing medical transcription are small firms now struggling to cope with the changes in a still highly profitable industry. CDIA hopes to become the industry resource for these companies.

“Complete and accurate clinical documentation is mission critical for healthcare providers,” said Peter Masanotti, a founding partner of CDIA. He explained that information captured without quality-assurance measures or best-practice processes often produce errors that could snowball down the healthcare delivery system. CDIA coordinates with other organizations and standards-setting groups to develop best-practice processes and guidelines to ensure quality clinical documentation.

Meantime, a new eBook for medical coders was recently released by its author, Nancy Krall, of icd-diagnosis.com, a help website for medical coders in search of the correct medical codes to use in their documents, for those who need to prepare for credentialing exams such as those in medical billing and coding training, in pharmacy technician classes, or in medical transcription training.

The eBook, ICD Medical Thesaurus For Coders, supplies coders with the synonyms they often need to look up the correct symptoms or diagnoses so that billing claims can be paid. Being a thesaurus the medical terminology in the eBook has been matched up with synonymous terminology which has the same or similar meaning of the original medical term. Krall, as a nurse and a trainer in a coding department, saw the need for a resource to help coders with the medical ICD terminology. ICD Medical Thesaurus is available at Amazon's Kindle Store at amzn.to/yzvVlB for $3.99.

The eBook comes at just the right time. The shift to ICD-10 by October 1, 2013 means that the 14,000 medical codes in ICD-9 that the medical community now uses will balloon to some 64,000 codes. The extra 50,000 codes will enable medical coders to be a lot more precise than before in coding for specific disease diagnoses. Krall hopes that ICD Medical Thesaurus will make it easier for medical coding employees to find the correct codes for problem-free claims.

Meditec, a top portal for medical billing and coding training, pharmacy technician classes, and medical transcription certification classes, provides medical coders the right coursework to be able to work right away with ICD-10 when it’s implemented.