Background: Diagnose and treat. That is the role of the physician. But the practice of medicine in recent years has been beaten hollow; its patient mission eclipsed by unwieldy technology and its practitioners so inundated with documentation and data entry, resulting in disengaged, frustrated, and burned out clinicians. The hospitalist has access to the entirety of each patient’s medical record within the EHR, but not nearly enough time to weave every note, lab, and study into a complete tapestry of that patient’s health. Their time instead must be spent assessing the patient and making clinical decisions in real-time with whatever information is readily available – and then documenting those decisions. It is all too easy for hospitalists to miss a critical diagnosis or create incomplete documentation resulting in CDI queries or missed revenue for the health system. It happens to roughly 7.4 million hospital patients every year. This isn’t because physicians aren’t capable of making the right diagnosis – it’s because they can’t get the information they need to do so.
Purpose: Through a partnership with Montefiore Health System, Regard set out to better understand if they could improve the clinician experience by improving and automating tasks related to documentation and diagnoses, moving upstream to improve reimbursement and clinical documentation integrity efforts.
Description: Montefiore Health System partnered with regard to move upstream to improve clinical documentation integrity efforts while also improving the clinician experience. Hospital EHRs contain troves of pertinent medical information like notes, labs, and imaging studies, but clinicians either can’t find or don’t have time to analyze the clinical data they need, when they need it. With Regard’s AI resident within the EHR clinicians at Montefiore are able to analyze the entirety of the medical record enabling them to accurately diagnose patients and automate clinical workflows like chart reviews and notes.
Conclusions: After using Regard for over 6 months the health system was able to prove that they could in fact improve clinician efficiency, reduce queries, and improve CC/MCC capture increasing hospital revenue. Results included generating over 1.03M in new revenue based on DRG upgrades. Additionally Montefiore saw significant increase across CMI, SOI, ROM, and CC/MCC capture rates as well as a 4.5% reduction in CDI queries resulting in 490 hours of CDI time saved annually.