A-Life Medical to Become Part of Ingenix
Combined businesses to accelerate development of advanced coding solutions for physicians and hospitals
EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. (September 21, 2010) –
Ingenix today announced that A-Life Medical will become part of the Ingenix Health Care Delivery business. The acquisition is the next logical step to the strategic alliance Ingenix and A-Life Medical established last year to develop advanced coding solutions for the health care market. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Ingenix has a long established history of providing leading medical coding research and encoding tools hospitals and physician practices. A-Life Medical is the leading provider of computer-assisted coding (CAC) software. Together, the companies will accelerate development of advanced coding solutions for all billing services providers, physician practices and in-patient and out-patient providers, as well as for more medical specialties.
“Combining A-Life Medical with Ingenix is an extension of our strategic alliance that enables deeper integration of our complementary technologies to create more powerful coding solutions for our clients,” said Bill Miller, executive vice president of health care delivery solutions at Ingenix. “Even as the volume of medical claims grows, health care providers face increasing pressure to reduce administrative costs. These challenges will become more acute as 30 million more Americans obtain health insurance because of health care reform, and as regulatory requirements such as the transition to the ICD-10 coding system come into effect. Together, A-Life Medical and Ingenix will create advanced coding solutions to help our clients manage these challenges efficiently.”
“Ingenix has unparalleled expertise in medical coding, and together, we can truly advance the science of coding technology to create a single, advanced CAC platform that supports coding across all venues of care,” said A-Life Medical President and CEO, Jaye Connolly. “In addition to helping our clients increase coding accuracy and compliance, we’ll help them achieve greater efficiencies through improved productivity and reducing the cost of managing disparate coding tools. We’ve already proven the success of this model, which can now be extended for billing services providers and physician practices.”
Currently, medical claims coders use manual processes, supported by un-connected, single-purpose systems. Clinical documentation is reviewed individually by medical coding staff who identify diagnoses and related procedures provided during patient care. These events must have codes assigned to them for use in billing and performance measurement programs. Coders use one system to research medical codes and another to create encoded documents. Inefficiencies in medical coding add more than $8 billion in administrative costs to the health care system, result in billing and payment errors and slow payments to health care providers.
A-Life Medical has developed LifeCode®, a patented Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology that assists medical coders and clinical abstractors through various software applications, including Actus®, A-Life Medical’s industry leading CAC product. LifeCode reads clinical documentation, deciphers the meaning and context of words within medical records and correctly identifies diagnoses and procedures provided during patient care. The software then recommends appropriate and compliant ICD-9 and CPT-4 codes. Coding staff then confirm the suggested codes or conduct additional research to validate them or adjust them.
CAC to ease transition to ICD-10
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) requires all health care organizations to use the Statistical Classification of Disease and Related Health Problems (ICD-10) when encoding medical documentation by October 1, 2013. ICD-10 is a sophisticated index of more than 155,000 codes that describe medical conditions and their severity. It will replace ICD-9, which had just 17,000 codes.
According to CMS, ICD-10 will facilitate better analysis of disease patterns, severity and treatment outcomes, and support health care quality improvement efforts. However, the vastly expanded code set will increase the time required to process documentation and the potential for errors, which lead to rejected claims and higher administrative costs. CAC technologies from Ingenix and A-Life Medical will enable physician practices and hospitals to transition to ICD-10 efficiently and without expanding their existing staff.
About A-Life Medical
San Diego-based A-Life Medical, Inc. is the pioneer and leading provider of computer-assisted coding products and services for the healthcare industry. Using its proprietary and patented Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, LifeCode, A-Life deciphers electronic transcribed patient encounters via the Internet through its data center, which are then appropriately coded for reimbursement purposes.
A-Life’s solutions address medical coding needs within the physician and hospital sectors. The company processes more than five million transactions monthly, has thousands of users and provides coding services to more than 40,000 physicians nationwide. Its customers include medical billing companies, physician groups, university medical centers and hospitals. For more information, please visit www.alifemedical.com.
About Ingenix
Ingenix is a leading provider of health information, technology and consulting services. Organizations, institutions, businesses and government agencies that comprise the health care system depend on Ingenix solutions and insights to improve their performance.
Source: Ingenix
