Documentation Improvement Helps Value-Based Purchasing
By Dr. Jon Elion, MD, FACC and Founder/President, ChartWise Medical Systems
I don’t believe it has ever been acceptable to simply look at Case Mix Index (CMI) alone as a measure of the impact of a Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) program. Given the current activities surrounding Value Based Purchasing (VBP), an even greater imperative exists for both a robust, well-rounded CDI program, and comprehensive statistics to guide it.
By way of introduction, VBP is set out as a requirement by the Affordable Care Act, and focuses on reducing healthcare costs while improving quality.This initiative is sometimes referred to as Pay for Performance (P4P).
Over 60 percent of all healthcare payments will be based on quality outcomes by the year 2018. But this requires immediate attention by hospitals now, not in 2018, as performance for certain quality measures in 2016 will shape payments for 2018.
One of the major measures being used for VBP is known as the AHRQ PSI 90 Composite, published by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It is a weighted average of the adjusted observed-to-expected ratios for the following conditions:
● Pressure Ulcer
● Iatrogenic Pneumothorax
● Central Venous Catheter-Related Bloodstream Infections
● Postoperative Hip Fracture
● Perioperative Pulmonary Embolism or DVT
● Postoperative Sepsis
● Postoperative Wound Dehiscence
● Accidental Puncture or Laceration
One of the major things coders and CDI programs can do to help a hospital properly document its performance against these Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) is to help to document and code conditions that may exclude a patient from being included in the calculations. For example, when evaluating a patient with an Iatrogenic Pneumothorax (air in the chest cavity caused by something a doctor did), the patient would be excluded from reporting if there is also a pleural effusion (fluid in the chest cavity).
While hospital executives are getting up to speed on the potential impact of VBP on their finances, codes and CDI programs need to become familiar with the components of AHRQ PSI 90 and improve the documentation and coding of patients who need to be included and excluded from reporting.
At the end of a recent talk I gave on the subject, I was offered the following observation from an audience member: “The only thing that our CFO measures now is CMI. All of our CDI metrics are no longer looked at or tracked.” After considering this question carefully, I replied, “I think your CFO is about to have a rude awakening! It sounds like someone needs to provide some education to the hospital executives on Value-Based Purchasing!!”
About The Author
Dr. Jonathan Elion, MD, FACC, is a practicing board-certified cardiologist in Providence, RI and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. With over 40 years of experience in computing and more than 25 years of experience in medical computing and information standards, Dr. Elion has committed his career to innovations in high value services and healthcare delivery to maximize efficiency and cost effectiveness. Jon is the founder of ChartWise Medical Systems, Inc., a Rhode Island based company that recently introduced ChartWise 2.0. It is the first-to-market interactive software system designed to improve precision in quality clinical documentation and to support revenue assurance through its web-based, comprehensive built-in expertise, electronic queries and robust on-demand reporting.