By JoAnne Kerwin Director, Health Information and Record Services Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital has increased reimbursements and coding productivity by integrating a DRG encoder and optimizer with its hospital information system.
Coders can now simply hit a hotkey from their clinical abstracting screen to enter the encoder.
All relevant information is transferred from the clinical abstracting screen to the encoder, including whether the patient is on Medicare or Medicaid. When this process is completed, the coder hits another hotkey and the diagnoses and procedures are automatically transferred back to the clinical abstracting screen. Louis A. Weiss Memorial Hospital is a 200 bed teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Chicago Hospitals. The hospital's specialties include cardiology, oncology, gastroenterology, and urology. In the past, the coders used manual code books and a computerized grouper.