Case Study
| 4 Min Read

Children’s National Health System increases response rates to 99 percent, query volume by 200 percent, with Artifact mobile app

2/12/2018

The Challenge
For years, Children’s National Health System’s CDI team relied primarily on email to communicate with providers about queries. Physicians would often have multiple steps to go through to complete a request for patient record documentation clarification, including having to login separately to the EMR to look up information in medical records.

“We needed a better way to reach physicians and communicate with them, as well as an easy and compliant way for them to answer queries, given all of their other responsibilities,” says Stephen Wood, Director of Revenue Analytics for Children’s.

The Solution
The Children’s CDI team learned about Artifact Health’s mobile physician query solution and realized it provided exactly what they needed – a seamless interface for physicians to quickly and compliantly answer queries.

Now instead of relying on email, calls, and face-to-face communication, hospital CDI staff can go directly to providers through Artifact’s mobile platform and reach them right on their smartphones. Physicians can complete queries from anywhere with just a few taps on their phone, reducing their administrative burden.

Children’s integrated Artifact’s mobile query platform with its Cerner EHR system. That integration means physicians no longer have to dig through medical records to answer queries; they can see the relevant records right on their phone within the query. Further, physicians’ query responses immediately populate the patient chart in Cerner. “Getting the EHR and Artifact mobile platform connected was crucial,” says Wood.

“Artifact helped us take a process that was burdensome for the CDI and coding teams as well as providers and replace it with easy, compliant access to queries. Now, providers can answer these queries compliantly right on their phone from wherever they’d like, making the process fast and less disruptive and time-consuming; giving them more time to focus on patient care.”

– Stephen Wood, Director of Revenue Analytics at CNHS

The Results
According to Wood, since implementing Artifact Children’s has achieved a 99 percent response rate, with 80 percent of the responses coming within two days of being sent. The average response time for concurrent queries is just one day (two days for retrospective queries). Importantly, Children’s has also seen a dramatic increase in overall query volume – a 200 percent increase in three months.

The hospital is also seeing changes in physician behavior. There are some items CDI staff used to regularly query for that providers are now proactively addressing in documentation, leading to more accurate and comprehensive charts. “This is the ultimate goal, and we’ve leaned on the Artifact tool and our CDI Educator to drive this,” says Wood.

Looking Ahead
Children’s finds the Artifact communication platform so effective that it wants to expand its use for other workflows, such as automatically notifying physicians about patient readmissions.