The end of the financial year is fast approaching. Managing it effectively and ensuring you set up your hospital for the year ahead means having the right information at your fingertips.
However, not all hospital executive teams have the information they need to determine whether or not they have met their performance targets. This in turn affects their ability to make informed decisions that can help improve their departmental performance or the quality of their patient care in a fiscally responsible manner.
Ensure reliability of reporting
Whether it’s assessing your funding or financial performance or planning about resource allocation, having complete and reliable reporting is key to better-informed decision making. Below are some tips to help ensure the reliability of your reporting.
Track your data
Tracking your data means having a holistic view of your patients, their diagnoses and the procedures and treatments provided to them. This kind of visibility into your operations offers you additional transparency throughout the year. It allows you to get a good grasp on how your hospital is performing and determine right away if any corrective measures are required.
Monitoring your data can be a difficult and tedious task. However, by using an efficient system you will have consistently tracked and easily accessed data at your fingertips.
Code Focus, for instance, enables both hospital executives and Health Information Managers (HIMs) to track and access their clinical coding data. As each episode is coded, Code Focus keeps a running total of their ABF budget vs actual budget. Giving them the information they need to ensure correct financial related assistance for their organisation.
Meet your targets for the financial year
The ability of your health information services team to meet clinical coding and auditing targets also affects the quality and integrity of your reporting.
Are your clinical coders meeting the number of records needed to be coded? Are your auditors able to ensure that episodes of interest are audited and reviewed in a timely manner?
Achieve complete and reliable clinical coding data by streamlining your clinical coding allocation and audit workflow. HIMs can set up coding worklists so coders can simply log in each day and have a concise but complete list of episodes they need to code. Eliminating potential backlogs while increasing their department’s efficiency.
HIMs can also use auditing tools that allow them to:
- Have a single view of all information required to audit
- Create audit rules using ICD-10 diagnostic and procedure codes, DRGs, ECCS, Specialties and Length of
- Stay to flag episodes for instance for audit
- Set up different audit work queues such as default audit list, priority lists, outstanding queries and overdue audits
All the capabilities mentioned above will enable you to have more insightful reporting. It will also help your hospital avoid any revenue leakage by uncovering funding that was missed at the time of coding.
Ensure quality of coded data
Reliable data is critical to ensure a correct assessment of the quality of patient care, as well as for hospital administration and resource allocation purposes.
Does your health information management team meet the regulatory expectations for data collection? Strengthen the quality of your coded data by investing in tools that allow you to better organise clinical coding work and ensure coding standards are being applied as required.
- Complete clinical documentation such as discharge summaries and operative notes
- Timely chart organisation and assembly
- Ongoing engagement and collaboration between the clinical staff and coding professionals
Continuous education
Continuous education of your clinical coding team is also key to ensure you always have reliable reporting needed for the end of the financial year.
By providing resources on the latest clinical coding guidelines and in-person training, you’ll be able to support the development of your clinical coders, positively impacting the efficiency and quality of their work.
This means:
- All medical records are coded and all episodes of interest can be audited more efficiently
- The data you’re tracking is always correct and of high quality
You can also use auditing tools that can help facilitate a real-time feedback loop between your coders and auditors.
For example, Code Focus helps health information management teams to easily track the progress of an item, request feedback and review feedback provided. This capability allows them to work towards a ‘first time right’ approach and use their learnings to reduce future coding errors.
What’s Next?
Closing out the end of the financial year is a daunting task. However, by having a good system in place that provides you with real-time and reliable reporting, that task becomes manageable and a great starting point to plan for the year ahead.
With Code Focus, you can capture all of your health service’s important clinical coding data and get significant insight into the things that matter the most.
Want to learn more about how Code Focus can help you? Request for a personal demo with our team today.
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