Health Information Management (HIM) Documentation

The HIM Documentation analytics accelerator is a reporting and analysis tool that allows senior leaders and HIM managers to quickly uncover issues and opportunities related to clinical documentation and coding. It provides executive level KPIs, historical performance trending, and HIM work lists to improve process visibility and coder productivity—decreasing time required to produce a final bill.

The HIM Documentation analytics accelerator supports efforts to improve billing efficiency.

The problem

Organizations looking to improve the efficiency of their billing processes may be stymied by issues with documentation. With little or no visibility into this upstream process, health information managers often struggle to effect change and improvement.

Our approach

The HIM Documentation accelerator provides a robust analytic front-end to organize, summarize, and visualize data on your discharge documentation processes. Users are able to see trends in documentation and coding timeliness, identify issues in particular accounts, and gauge the effectiveness of process improvement initiatives. The result? Managers have the data they need to improve productivity and efficiency in coding and documentation — and see the impact on the organization’s bottom line.

Benefits and features

• Gain actionable, near real-time data about key work processes. Automatically refreshed as new data is available, the accelerator combines documentation tracking measures in an easy-to-consume summary. You’re able to see trends in coding and clinical documentation timeliness as well as a snapshot of today’s performance and priorities. The result? You have timely performance tracking that allows you to determine the effectiveness of interventions to boost coder productivity and reduce AR days, days in DNFB, and outstanding or delinquent documentation.
• Identify issues and support efficient daily management activity. The documentation-timeliness data has account-level drill down, which allows you to identify physicians who may need support to comply with documentation policies. The application can also generate coding work lists prioritized by issue and last action—key information to streamline the work of health information management.

Use cases

• A medical coder is missing a document required to complete coding on a specific account. He uses the accelerator to send a message to the doctor, requesting that she complete and sign the document. When the doctor completes her documentation, the account is flagged for the coder and populates a work list—eliminating the need for the coder to manually check and follow up on the missing documentation.
• DNFB is growing across the system. The HIM manager uses the HIM Documentation accelerator to identify possible drivers of the trend, and notes that a small group of new physicians are consistently taking 90 days or longer to complete documentation—60 days longer than the stated policy timeframe. The HIM manager uses the application in meetings with these physicians, sharing examples of their delinquent accounts and showing the physicians the performance of their peers. The manager then works to develop individual improvement plans to help bring these physicians’ performance back in line with policy.