AMI announces EMscribe 10 CAC software to support ICD-10 diagnostic coding system

Artificial Medical Intelligence (AMI) today announced EMscribe® 10 Computer Assisted Coding (CAC) software to support the new ICD-10 diagnostic coding system required by the Department of Health and Human Services for all healthcare organizations to implement by October 2013.

“EMscribe 10 is modular and capable of quickly adapting to new coding systems”

ICD-10 is a diagnostic coding system created by the World Health Organization to replace the current ICD-9 coding system. ICD-10 is in almost every country in the world, except the United States. The ICD-10 system greatly expands upon the current system to support more than 155,000 codes (the current ICD-9 system only supports 18,000 codes). EMscribe 10 incorporates both ICD-10-CM (diagnosis) and ICD-10-PCS (hospital procedure) code sets.

EMscribe 10 software utilizes AMI's innovative Natural Language Processing (NLP) coding technology to read inpatient and outpatient records for appropriate diagnostic, procedure and CPT codes. It then pre-codes the records and presents them for coder validation, verification and review. Manual coders enhanced with the results of EMscribe can easily approve or amend the automatic results and increase efficiencies by as much as 80%. EMscribe 10 has the same look and feel and is powered by the same NLP technology used in earlier versions of EMscribe which has been deployed successfully in many hospitals throughout the United States.

"Without computer assistance with language processing, it will be very difficult and time consuming for coders, physicians and administrators to manually apply the roughly 155,000 codes contained in the ICD10 system," said Dr. Andrew Covit MD chief executive officer at Artificial Medical Intelligence. "That's roughly an eight fold increase in coding choices due to the more specific nature of the new code set. Healthcare institutions will need to rely on computer technology for assistance."

In addition to hospitals, healthcare technology companies looking to address ICD-I0 can benefit from EMscribe technology to interface with their existing applications. The EMscribe technology can be decoupled and bolted onto other systems that require advanced CAC/NLP for ICD-10. With its NLP capabilities, EMscribe can serve as a valuable solution to deal with the new, much more specific and detailed coding system.

"EMscribe 10 is modular and capable of quickly adapting to new coding systems," said Elliott Familant, chief technology officer for AMI. "The algorithms we've built capture the way physicians speak and practice medicine and how hospital guidelines are picked up for maximum reimbursement. The difference now is that new dictionaries are being applied to the ICD10 corpus. We didn't have to reinvent the wheel when we developed EMscribe 10. It's already a proven and extremely effective solution."

"AMI's EMscribe 10 is in a similar market position as to when we first introduced EMscribe Dx in 2005," said Stuart Covit, chief operating officer for AMI. "At that time, we were the first company to deploy Computer Assisted Coding for both inpatient and outpatient encounters at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital. We knew the industry would eventually move to the ICD10 corpus used worldwide and have been ICD10 "ready" since then. Our goal now is to attract early hospital adopters and offer an overall ICD-10 implementation plan through our EMscribe platform."

EMscribe 10 is available immediately.