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Learn how Intermountain Health collaborated with physicians to transform CDI efficiency

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 Solventum™ 360 Encompass™ System.

The challenge

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.”

The solution

Intermountain’s CDI initiative required no less than a fundamental paradigm shift in how its teams document patient encounters - moving from a retrospective query model to a much more proactive approach. It partnered with Solventum to deliver real time clinical insights to physicians within their normal workflow using 3M CDI Engage One in tandem with the 3M 360 Encompass System.

A 3D Icon Rendering of CDI Engage One�. Modal CDI Engage One� integrates with 3M 360 Encompass or 3M CDI Collaborate to embed AI-powered clinical intelligence into normal physician and CDI workflows.

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

Organizational profile

Intermountain Health

Intermountain Healthcare is a Utah-based, nonprofit health system composed of 24 hospitals, 225 clinics, a medical group with 3,000 employed physicians and advanced-practice clinicians, a health insurance company called SelectHealth, and 42,000 caregivers (which makes it Utah’s largest private employer). Intermountain is widely recognized as a leader in transforming health care by using evidence-based best practices to consistently deliver high quality outcomes at sustainable costs.

The progress we’re seeing with PSI’s, HAC’s and other quality metrics are almost exclusively due to CDI work.

Kearstin Jorgenson, MSM, CPC, COC

Director of Operation, Intermountain physician advisor services (IPAS), Intermountain Health

Results so far

Improved CDI efficiency—with an impact similar to 4.6 additional CDI RNs, providing more time for complex quality reviews

10-fold increase in potential opportunity, as CDI specialists expanded to all payer review

Quality impact from added specified documentation and codes that drive SOI, ROM, Elixhauser, and other risk adjustment factors