Nuance Communications, Inc. www.nuance.com announced that Baptist Health South Florida https://baptisthealth.net has realized $45 million in increased reimbursement since implementing Nuance’s Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) program. It has been reported that the system’s largest hospital saw a 14 percent Case Mix Index (CMI) increase and a financial impact of $26.5 million.
The goal of the CDI program is to make sure the final codes accurately reflect the complexity and severity of a patient’s illness, promoting accuracy and higher quality of the medical record,” said Dr. Lorena Chicoye, Baptist’s Corporate Medical Director of Managed Care.
She reports, “Once the Nuance clinical documentation program was up and running, it was amazing how much more documentation we were able to capture resulting in greater specificity in documentation.”
Through Nuance’s Advanced Practice CDI ™ program, Baptist Health was able to document more accurately the disease acuity of the patient population, which showed the doubling of severity of illness from 8 percent to 17.1 percent and the mortality risk from 7.7 percent to 14.5 percent.
Clinicians are now able to provide a more complete and detailed picture of a patient’s health and therefore able to recommend better treatment plans, provide better patient outcomes, and more accurately reflect quality especially when publicly reported.
Now that Nuance CDI has been implemented, physicians can receive clarifications and make adjustments on diagnoses while patients are still in their care before details are missed. This not only improves the documentation process but also improves education and physician response rates by capturing more accurate severity and mortality rates.