DOH has released more details about actions hospitals must take under its Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System injury, cause and place remediation project . The project was necessitated by a grant-funded study underway at DOH. SPARCS updated its edit rules to ensure injury, cause and place diagnosis codes between 2016 and 2023 are aligned to support the data integrity of the grant-funded study. As a result, New York state hospitals must resubmit inpatient and emergency department claims that fail these updated edit rules. Since the April 27 announcement of this project, HANYS has advocated on behalf of the state’s hospitals, bringing attention to the project’s workforce and financial implications. In addition, the DOH six-year data retention requirement and electronic health record changes have left some facilities lacking the data requested by the state. HANYS strongly encouraged SPARCS to enforce the new edit requirements only moving forward, to mitigate the challenges ...

A new data remediation project was discussed at a May 17 DOH forum for all providers that submit data to the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System. SPARCS plans to go back through data submitted for inpatient and emergency department cases since 2016 and validate that the injury, cause and place settings are complete and accurate, as required by the guidelines released at the end of April. DOH said that in the next two weeks, it will generate a list of claims that need reconciliation. Each hospital will need to go through records from 2016 to the present and update them to meet the new SPARCS requirements. The requirements are contingent for each year, meaning 2016 has its own set of data, 2017 has its own set, etc. Hospitals eagerly await details, as a remediation project like this could pose many challenges. Some hospitals have changed billing systems and, as a result, may not have access to records that far back. In addition, the medical record notes may not have comple...