Clinical documentation integrity teams play a critical role in ensuring quality healthcare and impacting a hospital's quality ranking. In this podcast episode of Iodine Intelligence, Fran Jurcak, Iodine's Chief Clinical Officer, and Tanya Motsinger, the System Director of Clinical Documentation Integrity at OhioHealth, discuss the importance of CDI programs and how AI-powered prioritization tools can help improve efficiency and impact quality metrics.

OhioHealth is a nationally recognized non-profit health system composed of 14 hospitals and over 200 outpatient and physician offices based out of central Ohio. Motsinger explains that their CDI program is focused on capturing severity of illness and risk of mortality while securing what's not being set in the chart very explicitly to help coders capture accurate diagnoses.

Motsinger shares that by implementing additional workflows while still maintaining high query and review rates, Ohio Health has been able to take on more work from a quality standpoint, with their team putting DRGs in a special calculator to understand variables and track specific quality metrics. Being able to report back on how many queries are impacting quality metrics directly has resulted in significant improvements in Ohio Health's CDI program.

In conclusion, prioritizing queries over review rates and finding ways to efficiently get the right case to the right CDI specialist at the right time can lead to significant improvements in healthcare quality metrics while freeing up bandwidth for second level reviews and other roles. The implementation of AI-powered prioritization tools can help achieve these goals without compromising established success or increasing staff FTEs.