"Welcome to our company blog. Within these blog posts, we hope to share our insights on clinical quality management, the patient-centered medical home, chronic disease management in primary care, evidence-based medicine, and the use of technology in ambulatory care settings."

- David Morin, CEO and Donald Nease Jr., MD, Chief Medical Officer

It seems as if the interest level has risen rapidly on our argument that there are many shortcomings when using billing data and ICD9 for a quality improvement program. I've been involved in numerous discussions about this over the last month and they are, in general, in-line with our thoughts at Cielo; billing data and ICD9 are plain insufficient! Usually, the discussion is with a person that has already undertaken a quality improvement program and found this out after trying to work with their billing data.

To study this further, we are working with a few providers and comparing their billing files to their Cielo Clinic database to look at how a patient's diagnoses align in these two datasets. While I can't release our findings just yet, suffice to say the results of this work are eye-opening. Look for more to come from us on this topic.

FYI - I'd also recommend reading a very good article in the February 2009 article of Healthcare Informatics that discusses this topic.-


Dave Morin
CEO
Cielo MedSolutions LLC