Improve healthcare quality management with Nuance CDI

Administrators understood that this manual, retrospective process resulted in critical data being missed. So Baptist Health, under the leadership of Lorena Chicoye, MD, corporate medical director, engaged Nuance to help change this practice. Baptist Health deployed Nuance’s Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) program because of the emphasis on physician engagement and proven results. Unique in its approach to clinical documentation improvement, the Nuance process employs technology and education designed to empower clinically trained CDI specialists to engage in a dialogue with physicians about the quality of patient care and how best to capture those details in their documentation—all while minimizing workflow disruption through a concurrent review process that brings to light care and quality documentation issues while patients are still in the hospital.

Within six months, Baptist Health saw measurable results. The average physician response rate to the CDI team’s concurrent clarifications increased from 10–20 percent to 95 percent. Even more compelling is the 80 percent agreement rate, indicative of physician compliance in capturing the quality details in patient documentation. In the four years since the Nuance CDI implementation, the more accurate severity-based CDI approach has generated a 13 percent average increase in Case Mix Index (CMI) across the system, translating to $45 million in appropriate reimbursement.