This October 100% of Q1 2023 data is due to the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System of New York State. Whether you receive a Statement of Deficiency or not, you may be wondering if there are better ways to manage SPARCS data changes. It’s not uncommon for hospitals and ambulatory surgery centers to experience challenges with SPARCS submissions, specifically with data updates and staying compliant. Even the most experienced, full-time SPARCS coordinator can have difficulties keeping up.                                                            In this blog, we’ll outline how SPARCS requirements can change, submission error consequences and solutions to overcome these challenges. Bef...

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...

Did you notice a large rejection rate when submitting your Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System data this month? That’s because the New York State Department of Health quietly released an updated SPARCS data set for injury, cause and place codes on April 27 – just four days before the month’s end. More than 10,000 diagnosis codes require a cause of injury. These new updates add a dozen additional diagnosis codes with this requirement. There are more than 2,200 cause of injury codes that require a place. The updated SPARCS dataset added a couple hundred to that. If your team submitted SPARCS data for the end of the month, your SPARCS coordinator is likely making a lot of adjustments to fix the rejections. With DataGen’s UDS platform, your team wouldn’t be bogged down with SPARCS rejections. Our web-based software automates formatting, syncing, error sweeping and submission to SPARCS . That includes the pesky rejections resulting from the updated injury, cause and place co...

Fulfilling the state’s requirements to report patient data to the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System can be a complex, confusing task. A single department’s data volume, let alone an entire facility’s, can be overwhelming. Many ambulatory surgery centers don’t even know that SPARCS reporting requirements apply to them. The New York State Department of Health requires hospitals and ASCs to submit clinical, billing, admission, discharge and transfer data to SPARCS. The state uses your patient data to track and report on community trends and set more accurate reimbursement rates. But what do you get other than a repeating cycle of submission error alerts on claims that have already been paid? SPARCS coordinators face many challenges:  new state requirements; inconsistent file upload formats;  updated coding every quarter; and error-free submission requirements. DataGen can help you meet these challenges with our UDS (UIS Data System™) software, SPARCS expertise an...