Mercy is one of the largest Catholic health care systems in the U.S., with dozens of hospitals and hundreds of clinics that serve millions of patients each year.
The system was running into a serious challenge all hospitals face: Properly documenting disease conditions that are secondary diagnoses to the main reason a patient was admitted. It decided to move away from having medical documentation specialists manually search through patient charts, looking for possible omissions, to an automated system that leverages Business Objects analytics and EMR technology from Epic.
Mercy is now able to instantaneously detect possible omissions and generate a report for specialists, compared to the manual chart review process, which can take as long as 40 minutes. Documentation specialists can drill down in the reports for more details and submit queries to doctors about a potential problems.
Beyond time savings, the system has improved communications between physicians and documentation specialists, more accurate data, and as a result, an increase in reimbursements for the hospital system of possibly more than $1 million per year.
There is a lot more to Mercy’s award winning project. Go right here to get all of the details.
