Western Maryland Health System has selected Artifact Health, a mobile platform that streamlines the physician query process to make it fast and easy for physicians to answer queries that improve the quality of patient records, ensure full reimbursement for services, and increase collaboration between clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and coding staff.
With the implementation of Artifact Health’s mobile query platform, WMHS physicians can respond to a query compliantly in under a minute with as few as three taps on their phone. Hospitals who have implemented Artifact report raising physician response rates to nearly 100 percent and decreasing response time to hours, helping them secure proper reimbursement while improving the accuracy of quality outcomes.
The state of Maryland operates under the unique All-Payer Model with a strict quality-based reimbursement program. Hospital payment is linked with performance and accurate measures depend on strong physician engagement in documenting care precisely. Because of this program, meticulously capturing and coding patients’ episodes of care is especially important for WMHS to determine hospital revenue and avoid financial penalties.
“Responding to queries has been a time-consuming multi-step process for our physicians, CDI specialists and coders who have been relying on faxing and scanning paper to facilitate the process,” said Kimberly Repac, Chief Financial Officer of WMHS. “By using Artifact, our physicians will have a simple, instant way to answer queries from their smartphones, and the query note is automatically sent to our Meditech EMR. Integrating Artifact with our EMR helps ensure that our records are accurate and that we receive proper reimbursement.”
