Hospitals can now easily leverage ChartAccess® Comprehensive EMR to comply with and report on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) core measures, thereby meeting "meaningful use" criteria -- thanks to a partnership between Prognosis Health Information Systems and Excellence in Healthcare, a healthcare quality assurance consulting company based in Bentonville, Ark.
"If the core measures are not met and reported on, hospitals stand to lose a significant amount of revenue. Failing to report on these quality measures can reduce Medicare reimbursement by as much as 4% a quarter. By working with Excellence in Healthcare, we are making the task an easy one for providers. And, in the process, hospitals are enhancing quality and improving efficiency," says Ramsey Evans, CEO of Prognosis.
The collaboration has enabled Prognosis to leverage Excellence in Healthcare's deep knowledge of core measures to create "clinical pathways" that automatically monitor if the CMS quality-of-care core measures are being met. With such functionality built into ChartAccess, providers get real-time feedback on the status of quality measures based on information pulled from the electronic medical record (EMR), as opposed to after-the-fact feedback that is typically collected via claims data. As a result, clinicians can make changes to care delivery that have an immediate and positive impact on quality.
Plus, the EMR prompts clinicians to meet core measure requirements in a timely fashion. For example, ChartAccess prompts caregivers to provide aspirin to acute myocardial infarction patients upon admission, one of the core measure requirements. In addition, if an organization is struggling to comply with certain measures, leaders can simply turn on a feature that makes it impossible for caregivers to continue delivering care without completing the core measure requirements.
Prognosis also tapped into Excellence in Healthcare's knowledge to ensure that the electronic medical records contain proper documentation. For example, if an acute myocardial patient cannot take aspirin, the system prompts caregivers to document the reason (i.e. an allergy). Without such clear documentation, staff members would need to review the entire patient record to determine if the patient can be excluded from the core measure requirements. Such labor intensive work quickly eats up hospital human resources budget.
In addition, to qualify for meaningful use incentives available through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, providers are required to use certified electronic records to submit clinical quality and other measures. Because Excellence in Healthcare supplies Prognosis with CMS-approved core measure reporting rules and expectations, care providers can rest assured that the proper supporting data is being generated and reported by the EMR.
"It was easy for us to apply our quality and core measures knowledge to the Prognosis EMR because it is an open and malleable system. The entire record is 100% searchable. Other systems simply make it too difficult to abstract data," says Stanley Green, M.D., director of healthcare quality at Excellence in Healthcare. "With sophisticated quality intelligence imbedded into an electronic record, healthcare providers can truly make significant strides in clinical care improvement."
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