Health Language partners with MEDecision to take advantage of ICD-10

Health Language Inc., which specializes in terminology management, is partnering with MEDecision, which provides payer-based clinical summaries and care gap alerts to doctors. The aim of their collaboration is to help MEDecision comply with and take advantage of the ICD-10 diagnosis code set.

The ICD-10 codes, which will be required as of October 1, 2013, have greater granularity than the current ICD-9 codes because they're far more numerous and specific. MEDecision will use HLI's Language Engine in its "collaborative health management portfolio" to integrate faster and more easily with its customers' systems as they move to ICD-10.

Eric Demers, executive vice president and chief strategy officer at MEDecision, said that the Language Engine (LE) will enable his firm to offer "an additional health management benefit" beyond ICD-10 compliance. In other words, health plans will be able to use MEDecision's clinical summaries more effectively for care management after all of their claims are encoded in ICD-10.

HLI, which offers the ability to achieve a kind of "semantic interoperability" among disparate information systems, recently announced other deals with health information exchange vendors, including Orion and Shared Health.

According to Bruce Taffel, MD, chief medical officer of Shared Health, HLI's Health Engine will help his company use data from disparate systems in clinical decision support by normalizing the data to a single terminology.

To learn more:
- here's the MEDecision announcement 

Related Content:
Don't delay converting to ICD-10
Prep for ICD-10 now or risk nonpayment in 2013
ICD-10 implementation: Are you ready for Oct. 1, 2013
CMS offers fact sheet explaining ICD-9 to ICD-10 changes
Orion, Health Language Inc. partner in New HIE approach
Ingenix and Health Language Inc. launch Ingenix global code manager