Nuance study shows improved mortality ratings for CDI use

Quantros, a provider of enterprise safety risk management in the healthcare industry, and Nuance Communications have released results of a study that showed significant quality improvement for hospitals implementing Nuance’s clinical documentation improvement (CDI) solutions.

Using Quantros’ CareChex hospital quality ratings methodology, the study focused on measures of observed to expected mortality, as these, according to Quantros, are most aligned with proper identification of a patient’s principal diagnosis and patient severity changes reflected in clinical documentation.

Of Nuances’ clients in the study, 93 percent were in the top 50 percent of CareChex overall mortality ratings of US hospitals, exceeding the national benchmarks for morality rating performance.

For Nuance CDI clients, 36 percent were in the top 10 percent of hospitals in analysis of CareChex overall mortality rating performance.

According to Nuance, hospitals that use the CDI program see significant improvement in quality ratings post implementation, including up to two times improvement on mortality ratings, and up to seven times improvement on expected mortality ratings.

“In the emerging value-based healthcare economy, payments and reimbursement are inextricably linked to the quality of care that is delivered, documented and measured,” explains Shane Wolverton, senior vice president corporate development, Quantros.

“Winners in this new climate will be the organizations that accurately capture and report performance on a multitude of quality measures and performance indicators, and which are not sufficiently reconcilable through the lens of coding metrics or case mix index (CMI) alone.”

Anthony Oliva, vice president and chief medical officer, Nuance, added: “The implementation of our clinically-focused CDI program combined with CareChex analytics affords hospitals an even stronger and more realistic severity-adjusted view of the quality of care delivered to patients in value-based care models.

“Hospitals need data to know where to focus their efforts -- where they need quality improvement and how much of that is a physician documentation problem. One impactful way to remove the noise and pinpoint where to focus is through a CDI program that is clinically focused.”