Break the ICD-10 Code   By Brad Lindemann, President, Ambassador Solutions There’s a tsunami rolling through the U.S. healthcare industry destined to crash upon all shores come October 1, 2013.  That’s the looming federally mandated deadline by which providers and payers must be transitioned from the current ICD-9 medical coding standards to the new ICD-10 standards.  ICD stands for “Interna...

Ours is truly the ultimate people business.  As such, players in the IT consulting game are subject to ebullient highs and excruciating lows.  Having been in the game for nearly a quarter of a century now, I’ve had my fair share of both.  Yet, I still get near giddy whenever we put one of our true IT pros to work on what is often some of our clients’ greatest challenges.  Conversely, wheneve...

Doing well is the result of doing good. That's what capitalism is all about. - Ralph Waldo Emerson Ambassador Missions has discovered an amazing organization that is changing the world in a big way. By way of an introduction, we've got a trivia question for you: What is the world's most expensive luxury versionof a product relative to the cost of thecomparable standard version? Hint #1: ...

This is Part 3 of a 3 part series originally entitled:  Who's Going To Amazon Healthcare?   As with any “change the world” undertaking, getting started is never easy.  Amazon didn’t become the second most valuable retailer in the world ($81 billion market cap) by initially offering any product to any customer anywhere at any time.  They started off selling books online out of Mr. Bezos’ gar...

This is Part 2 of a 3 part series originally entitled:  Who's Going To Amazon Healthcare?   Conventional wisdom holds that telemedicine is best practiced in a real-time manner.  The physical doctor/patient interaction is captured via live video with the aid of a nurse or medical assistant at the patient’s end.   Though such real-time virtual visits will sometimes be necessary, it’s much mor...

The fledgling field of telemedicine will soon be very big business on a global scale.  The world is rapidly moving towards an environment wherein many medical services will be virtually provided via the Internet.  This is as certain as it once was that a significant portion of retail goods and services would fly their way through cyberspace and into consumers’ hands.  In the process, a new ge...

  Like a delighted child on Christmas morning, I recently discovered a special gift within the Biblical account of “The Christmas Story”:      “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)       So, what were “all these things” that the mother of Jesus treasured and pondered?  The passage refers to the things that Mary had just heard from the s...

  According to Matt Gutwein, CEO of Marion County Health and Hospital Corporation, the traditional “fee for service” healthcare system in our country has fallen and can’t get up.  “Where else can you get a gig that pays you the same regardless of need or effectiveness or even if it’s determined that the service rendered was completely unnecessary?”, asks Gutwein.   This fatally flawed system...

Author Don Miller hit the big-time in 2003 with his best-selling memoir, Blue Like Jazz.  Not sure why I never read it.  BLJ remains wildly popular, especially within contemporary Christian circles, primarily because it challenges virtually every notion of what it means to be a true Christian.  Intrigued by the author as much as the story, some movie guys came on the scene in hopes of producing...

Towards the end of what proved to be the most challenging year of my life, I came upon a book that proved to be a true Godsend.  Fearless by Max Lucado sets forth a compelling case for why the book’s subtitle, “Imagine Your Life Without Fear”, is not only possible, but completely rational given the overwhelming evidence to support such imaginings.  However, to get there from here, the reader ...