Agility and COVID-19: IMO’s ongoing pandemic response

Things change rapidly in a pandemic, and all sectors of the medical community are working tirelessly to help manage the spread of the novel coronavirus. With coding systems frequently updating their COVID-19 terms and guidelines, IMO is striving to make sure our clients have the documentation tools they need when they need them with a special off-cycle update to both our terminology and insights offerings.
COVID-medicalterminology

As the coronavirus pandemic continues, medical professionals across the globe are frequently expanding their collective knowledge about the clinical manifestations of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Accordingly, international and domestic coding systems often update their EHR terminology guidelines in order to help providers describe the diagnosis and care of COVID-19 patients. Recently, several organizations have shared new medical coding terms for documenting laboratory tests, pulmonary complications, presentation of symptomatic and asymptomatic cases, and comorbidities that have unique relevance to treatment of the novel coronavirus.

As a medical coding company, these ongoing updates represent a chance for IMO to be agile in responding to the needs of our customers. Following up on our March 26 release of new coronavirus terms and IMO Precision COVID-19 Sets, our off-cycle April terminology release adds to our previous EHR integration offerings so that our partners have the most up-to-date terminology and insights capabilities when managing COVID-19 care.

Our April 21, 2020 release includes two new value sets added to the IMO Precision COVID-19 Sets library. These are specifically for customers utilizing the new Special Use LOINC codes issued by the Regenstrief Institute. These value sets, one for customers with IMO Core Procedure or ProcedureIT and another for clients not yet using these offerings, will help health systems track the laboratory test results for COVID-19 patients. Identification of these tests and their corresponding results will assist our customers in retrospective analysis of their overall cohort of coronavirus patients.

Additionally, in response to the April 1 release of new instructions and coding guidelines for COVID-19 from the Centers for Disease Control, IMO included new mappings and clinical interface terminology in our off-cycle April release. These changes support the documentation of pulmonary and respiratory complications from COVID-19, symptomatic and asymptomatic presentation of the disease, as well as support for documenting comorbidities now known to have a unique impact on the duration and severity of the novel coronavirus.

As further updates to code sets, guidelines, and recommendations for COVID-19 documentation emerge, IMO will continue to assess how to ensure our clinical interface terminology and supporting products are revised to best suit our clients’ needs during this time.

For more on IMO’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, click here.

Watch our COVID-19 webinar on-demand.

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