Ensuring clinical documentation is completely and accurately captured in a patient's medical record is essential for health systems, as this not only affects revenue but also patient outcomes
During an April 28 webinar, hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by 3M Health Information Systems, 3M Chief Product Owner Kaitlyn Crowther highlighted how advanced technologies support these goals while promoting physician well-being. She discussed how artificial intelligence technology, including advanced natural language understanding, help health systems close the loop between physicians and CDI teams.
Four takeaways:
1. Effective physician engagement in quality and reimbursement initiatives is key priority for most healthcare organizations.Ms. Crowther said physicians are overburdened with administrative tasks which lead to physician burnout and poor patient engagement. That is where AI can help with computer-assisted physician documentation (CAPD) that delivers proactive nudges to physicians within their normal workflow to close gaps in patient care and the clinical note. "There's so much that depends on what's in the written record, and by nudging physicians in that golden moment when they are thinking about the patient and creating that content, we can really help drive the optimization of their time," said Ms. Crowther.
2. Using an advanced, extensible, configurable technology platform enables healthcare systems to customize workflows and optimize current systems. The 3M conversational AI platform enables clinicians to capture the patient story in real-time directly in the EHR. Combined with natural language understanding, this advanced technology analyzes the note in real time to understand both the content and the context of the narrative and then delivers proactive, actionable clinical insights to physicians. This technology utilizes a complex information model to get the most accurate and complete clinical picture around conditions, such as heart failure to use an example, even if the physician does not explicitly mention heart failure in the note.
3. Closing the loop between clinical care and revenue integrity breaks traditional workflow and information silos between physicians and CDI teams. Incomplete and/or inaccurate clinical documentation becomes more challenging to correct over time. Therefore, it's important to close the gap between clinical care that drives patient outcomes and revenue integrity which aims to prevent lost revenue and/or compliance risks for the hospital or health system, said Ms. Crowther. She described closed-loop documentation as "getting it right the first time" by bringing CDI, coding insights and best practices to front-end workflows in real time using CAPD technology.
4. Shared clinical intelligence with CDI teams drives technology enabled automation, prioritization, and summarization. According to Ms. Crowther, the same AI-powered clinical intelligence used to support physicians also provides advanced prioritization and automation for CDI specialists so that they can focus on more complex cases to capture the appropriate severity of illness and risk of mortality. Additionally, the AI can identify additional query opportunities supported by a summarized clinical evidence sheet and drives improvement in clinical, financial, and operational outcomes.
*3M acquired M*Modal in 2019
To learn more about 3M clinician and CDI solutions, click here.