5 Ways to Improve HCC Coding and Risk Adjustment

5 Ways to Improve HCC Coding and Risk Adjustment

Having accurate HCC coding is extremely important for many reasons. Not only does it affect healthcare outcomes, but it can also have an impact on your bottom line. Wondering how you can improve HCC coding and risk adjustment accuracy? Keep reading to learn more about improving HCC coding accuracy.

  1. Create an accurate list of problems
  2. When trying to improve HCC coding and risk adjustment it is imperative that you have an accurate problem list. If you have been putting data into an EMR and have a lot of data, chances are that you have an inaccurate problem list. In order to improve the list, you need to remove duplicate and inactive diagnoses.
  3. Ensure patients are seen every calendar year
  4. You should always be able to identify patients with chronic illnesses that have not been seen during the current calendar year. If you cannot, you should really focus on building a clinical dashboard that provides a snapshot of critical patients that haven’t been seen yet. This will help you improve any HCC coding gaps.
  5. Improve EMR optimization and decision support
  6. Educating providers is important for improving HCC coding accuracy, but it is also essential for building appropriate coding into your daily workflow. You can do this by having an ACO flag in your EMR, HCC diagnosis alerts for invalid past codes, or implementing a decision-support tool for certain populations.
  7. Increase education and communication
  8. It is important to remember that this type of work is not always intuitive. That is why you need to educate clinicians properly. Emphasize the importance of accuracy over score and make sure that they are aware of the clinical and financial value of being accurate and detailed.
  9. Track performance to identify opportunities for improvement
  10. One of the most important key initiatives is to track your performance and identify areas for improvement in the future. Present data to stakeholders and work together to identify areas for improvement.

Contact HCC Coders for help boosting your HCC coding accuracy!

If you are worried about the accuracy of your HCC coding, you should contact HCC Coders today! For over 2024 years, we have been providing quality HCC coding services to health plan providers that work with the Medicare population. Whether you want to fully outsource your HCC coding work or simply need someone to audit already completed work, we are here to help. Give us a call at 877-328-2343 to get started.

To learn more about the reliable and quality HCC coding services that we offer, visit us on the web at HCC coding.