Local Canton Hospital Innovates with Computer-Assisted Coding

Southeastern Ohio Regional Medical Center opened its doors in 1952 as Guernsey Memorial Hospital, named after the county it serves. Since then, Southeastern Med has served as Guernsey County’s only general acute health care center and largest employer. A true community hospital, Southeastern Med is affiliated with approximately 180 physicians and licensed for 99 beds. It has a coding staff of seven, along with four clinical documentation specialists. When Denise Stephens, director of documentation integrity/utilization management, started as a documentation specialist four years ago, all documentation at Southeastern Med was on paper and over the years she developed an Excel spreadsheet to track queries and create monthly graphs for her director and VP. While it worked fine, the documentation team was also aware of the opportunities they were missing out on and the information they were unable to provide.

Amidst her search to find an application to assist the clinical documentation specialists at Southeastern Med, Stephens attended the 2012 Northern Ohio Documentation Specialist meeting. The speaker for the day was ChartWise Medical Systems Founder and CEO, Dr. Jon Elion. Stephens took notice and later called for a demonstration of his company’s software. For Stephens and her team, ChartWise was the clear choice. Their willingness to work with a small community hospital, the affordability and the ability to import data via HL7 feeds helped them stand out from other vendors.

Stephens took the ChartWise software to the medical center’s Purchase Analyst Support Team and pitched them on the software’s return on investment, ease of use, ability to toggle from ICD-9 to ICD-10, and the minimal internal support needed from the medical center’s IT team. Important to Stephens was the ability to demonstrate to the CEO that ChartWise could help the staff accomplish more, improve the quality of care and supplement the hospital’s needs.

“In our case, the addition of the documentation system promotes the quality and integrity of care received, a decrease in medical necessity denials, and more accurate coding,” said Stephens. “These do not necessitate reimbursement figures but assist in our HVBP, APU and validation with CMS.”

Once ChartWise was selected, implementation went quite smoothly. The ChartWise implementation team and trainers worked closely with Stephens and her team, preparing them for their go-live. When asked about the training, transition, and support from ChartWise, Stephens has nothing but praise. “ChartWise is fabulous! They treat their clientele like family,” said Stephens. “They want you and your team to succeed.”

Southeastern Med implemented the ChartWise software in September of 2014, and in the first three months, the medical center’s query impact captured more than the previous three quarters of the year combined. Other victories reported by Southeastern Med are ease of use, time saved, superb support, and being able to test and easily transition from ICD-9 to 10.

“We are proud to be able to partner with Southeastern Ohio Regional Medical Center,” said Mary Cooper, executive vice president of ChartWise. “It’s exciting to see the success this wonderful community medical center has achieved in such a short amount of time. ChartWise is humbled to have been able to play a part.”

When asked about her favorite ChartWise 2.0 features, Stephens explains, “We love the program’s Sophie built-in intelligence feature which helps guide the staff through queries and consideration of other diagnoses. Then, there’s the baseline to working DRG and the ease of review thanks to features like color coded notes. In the past, we would use an encoder and each time we received a new or additional diagnosis we would have to start over. Now, new information is simply added to the list, which saves a tremendous amount of time. Finally, the customer service is phenomenal. You can’t undervalue fast response times and a personalized touch. From top to bottom, Southeastern Med is reaping the benefits of implementing the ChartWise 2.0 software.”