In recent weeks, we've sought to demystify the new ICD-10 taxonomy in time for the pending October 1 deadline. This coding language hasn't changed in over 30 years, so it's understandable for chiropractors and other medical professionals to be a tad apprehensive about the switch—even if they have the best chiropractic EHR software on hand. However, as we previously reported, ICD-10 has been developed to improve patient care and reduce the amount of administrative work that health care practitioners have to drudge through each day. Plus, ICD-10 is not an entirely new animal. It is simply a more specialized form of the coding system that has been in place for decades.

This week, industry news outlet Health Leaders Media focused on these benefits, positing that ICD-10 and chiropractic EHR were both a boon for clinical documentation and stating that this year would be a "watershed moment" for the industry.

"Clinicians are taking care of patients, doing their documentation as they always have, but interface terminology actually gives them phrases or other things that they can use, and those are mapped to SNOMED [the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms] and often to ICD," explained s Rita Scichilone, former senior advisor at the American Health Information Management Association, told the source.

According to the source, chiropractic EHR must generate data in line with SNOMED clinical terms to be approved for use under meaningful use stage 2, which will bring about a degree of quality assurance and regularity that has been sorely lacking in this field. But even with these stipulations, it is still important to seek out chiropractic EMR software with a track record for reliability,  ease of use and compatibility.