Prominence partnered with Mercy, a multi-state health system, to change the way they use data to make clinical documentation and coding decisions. As they say in their case study, “as long as there are inaccurate charts, there is work to be done”. In 2014, a Clinical Documentation Improvement committee noticed several potential opportunities:

• Documentation wasn’t consistently as accurate as it needed to be to represent the true nature of a patient’s stay
  • Hospital providers were focusing their documentation on the primary reason for the admission, often missing documentation of secondary conditions
  • Clinical indicators in physician notes often lacked the level of detail necessary for coding specialists to accurately code the encounter
• The processes for addressing documentation problems weren’t efficient
  • Medical Documentation Specialist (MDS) staff often spent a half hour (or more) reviewing a single chart, limiting the impact they could have on improving accuracy across patient encounters
  • The communication workflow between an MDS staff member and a physician was cumbersome and time-consuming
• ​The turnaround time for resolving chart issues was too long to enable thorough follow-up
  • Messages conveyed to providers were inconsistent, causing frustration and disengagement
  • Coding issues are easiest to address when brought up before the patient is discharged, but that requires increased coordination

Together with Prominence, Mercy’s coordinated clinical and analytic teams designed and built an innovative solution that addressed these areas of focus. The ideal solution required:

• Feedback from everyone involved in the workflow – both MDS staff and physicians, to ensure that the workflow improvements met everyone’s needs
• An analytical tool with near-real time data available and automation to maximize staff review time
• A dynamic way to identify and prioritize encounters with the most opportunity to improve documentation, increasing the impact of the efforts
• Actionable workflows to integrate with from analytic solutions to patient charts

We worked with our colleagues at Mercy to identify and define the highest priority measures, to be brought living within the first 30 days. After successfully launching the solution on-time, we worked to establish an iterative optimization process which enabled the team to quickly improve and build upon the live application, prioritizing by user group and impact. ​