Better physician engagement, better CDI outcomes

Intermountain Healthcare’s ambitious CDI initiative required no less than a fundamental paradigm shift in how its teams document patient encounters—moving beyond manual processes and leveraging technology.

CDI leaders collaborated closely with their physician advisor team to integrate workflows, automate routine work, prioritize cases with the most opportunity and expand to all-payer and quality reviews. It partnered with Solventum to deliver real time clinical insights to physicians within their normal workflow using 3M™ M*Modal CDI Engage One™ in tandem with the 3M™ 360 Encompass™ System.

Intermountain Health launched an ambitious initiative for clinical documentation integrity (CDI) to move beyond manual processes and leverage technology to integrate workflows, prioritize cases with the most opportunity, and expand to all payer and quality reviews. Like many health systems, it faced resistance from clinicians who were already weighed down by administrative burdens and struggled to see the value of CDI programs.

Workflows for physician and CDI teams were often misaligned, leading to inefficiencies, documents gaps and low query rates. This made difficult to capture a clear view of the patients population, which was essential for accurate reporting on patient safety indicators (PSIs), hospitals acquired conditions (HACs), risk of mortality (ROM) and other key measures.

Dr. Kory Anderson, medical director of physician advisor services and CDI at Intermountain Health, said, “Our frontline physicians needed to get up to speed on the ‘why’ of CDI. Getting their engagement was essential to reducing the downstream consequence of documentation gaps, including significant impact on risk adjustment, quality metrics and continuity of care.”

Kearstin Jorgenson, MSM, CPC, COC, operations director, physicians advisor services, Intermountain Health, said, “We needed a way to intersect with physicians’ natural workflow, not to further complicate it. The scope of our CDI project expanded to the entire patient population, not just Medicare and Medicaid patient. Plus, we intentionally launched the project as part of Intermountain’s overall quality effort. We were asking for substantial change on a short timeline and there was a lot at stake.”

Results, outcomes and/or financial improvements should not be interpreted as a guarantee or warranty of similar results. Individual results vary depending on circumstances.