Health care service line management (SLM) began to evolve in the 1980s to help organizations increase their market share as an off set to losses in revenue due to implementation of DRGs (Diagnostic Related Groups). Due to the focus of service line management, it was originally not successful. There is now a resurgence of the SLM model with a focus on improvement of clinical performance, financial performance, and patient satisfaction.
Assessing ICD-10 financial risk is a multi-faceted challenge. ICD-10 introduces financial risk that should be assessed using a variety of tools. Since ICD-10 is the data standard that will be used to express the condition of the patient, the procedure to treat the patient, and the reimbursement for the procedure it is essential that information systems supply data to the service line managers that support ICD-10. The service line team must be able to analyze actionable data in order to make changes as needed. Cost accounting, variance reports, flexible budgeting, reimbursement modeling, clinical productivity, case mix and severity, quality assurance, and marketing management.
If your organization uses EDI x12 transaction standard 837 claims files to perform your assessment on inpatient encounters? Are you using a data warehouse? Consider data quality issues as well as non-standard patient identifier schemes which may be used to map to service lines. Some organizations use DRGs or APR DRGs as part of their service line definitions.
However, without support from physicians it will be difficult to make clinical changes that can improve patient care. And that creates the challenge. If you are using an analytics tool to perform part of a component of an ICD-10 financial risk assessment, your ICD-10 clinical documentation improvement efforts can be led by indicators developed in analytics. Those analytics should be broken out in the way the healthcare provider measures its performance, which may be as a service line. The ICD-10 assessment including ICD-10 reimbursement risk analysis can guide you to specialties and even individual providers (physicians, nurses, and other clinicians) who may create a greater reimbursement risk based on incomplete documentation in ICD-9.
There is an important strategy that should be used in auditing charts and communicating the results with physicians. In our practice we feel we’ve perfected some approaches that were guided by a physician, for physicians. Please contact us for more information.
Physician engagement, combined with chart audits and analytics must be used carefully in a balanced method to ensure that the ICD-10 transition works smoothly across service lines, physician groups, and financial management.