Health technology company Ciox, today launches a platform designed to train and assess medical coders, equipping coders with vital education and development opportunities in an academic setting or on the job. Named Ciox HealthSource Gym, it’s a SaaS platform that provides an engaging learning environment of data-rich training and practice scenarios to optimize coding performance.
The module sits on top of Ciox’s HealthSource, a clinical data platform that uses the latest interoperability and artificial intelligence technology to improve clinical data exchange and transform the flow of healthcare information. HealthSource Gym offers a hands-on learning approach that will initially serve two key markets: healthcare providers and academic coding programs.
For healthcare providers, it aids new and experienced coders in developing skills, diversifying knowledge across business segments, gaining experience and assimilating to an organization’s coding practices. The platform allows leaders to assess and understand a coder’s capabilities, properly screen candidates and build out teams based upon skill sets, which reduces onboarding time, increases team efficiency and advances coders’ capabilities. Most importantly, it can improve accuracy and quality, helping to optimize revenue and reduce denials. Organizations can customize the training experience by uploading proprietary content and can also use it for targeted training to address specific areas where performance improvement is needed.
In the academic environment, HealthSource Gym helps to solve a common problem impacting coding educators: preparing their students for the reality of medical coding.
The platform utilizes real clinical content and delivers that content in a manner that replicates the true coding experience. HealthSource Gym offers feedback to students in real time and provides the mechanism for coding educators to educate effectively and efficiently, significantly reducing the slope of the on-the-job learning curve.
“One of the greatest struggles the medical coding industry faces is the manual effort and time required to properly train and onboard coders and keep them up-to-date on the latest developments,” says Paula Lawlor, Executive Vice President, Provider Solutions at Ciox. “Coding is a dynamic industry that evolves rapidly, and current practices for training coders are not sustainable. We’ve created HealthSource Gym to alleviate this pressure and provide an immersive learning experience. Current research has shown that experiential learning with immediate feedback is highly effective in motivating and shaping behavior.”
As a SaaS platform, HealthSource Gym only requires a short implementation cycle and can be set up easily, with minimal IT support. In the future, Ciox plans to extend the platform’s use to key sectors such as risk adjustment coding, CDI training and denials prevention.
