Vice President of Quality

Your organization’s reputation is linked to the data resulting from a physician’s documentation in patient records. For example, on Healthgrades, physician quality ratings reports include reports for all of the hospitals where they admit patients. So, to the extent that the quality ratings for hospitals are positive, that will reflect on the physician. Moving forward, physicians will personally be impacted in their own practices with pay for performance quality initiatives that rely upon information abstracted from patient records. The consistent, strict guidelines for documentation that physicians must follow in the hospital setting can be translated over to their own practices.

Making physicians consistently aware of the relevant quality ratings results of your hospital can ignite the competitive fire within them. Every physician wants to be affiliated with an organization that is a winner, has a reputation for high quality and pursues a noble cause. These three organizational attributes are often found together in the same organization. If your organization does not meet these three criteria then you need to decide what you need to do to get your organization on board. Chances are good that if you do, the physicians will follow. If you communicate continuously to physicians about what documentation practices of theirs can impact the hospital’s quality ratings, they are likely to comply. They want to be affiliated with organizations that are A’s, not B’s or C’s.

Pay for performance and quality measures currently have an indirect economic impact on healthcare organizations. Some of the impact comes from patients who use Web sites such as the Joint Commission’s Quality Check, HealthGrades.com, Medicare Quality Indicators, or the Leapfrog Group to choose where they receive care. Over the next several years, however, quality measures will continue to increasingly, and significantly, impact the payment equation. A good example of a subtle, yet real, quality measure with economic impact is the present on admission (POA) requirement. This initial list of diagnoses for which a hospital will not be reimbursed (unless the condition was present on admission) will likely grow. Because of POA and similar regulations likely to be implemented, inaccurate documentation will cost hospitals significantly greater amounts of reimbursement each year.