Maintain and improve your data quality during this crisis with the help of 3M

12 June 2020 Paid content

3M Health Information Systems is fully committed to supporting the NHS during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. 

We recognise the measures that a trust’s clinical coding team has taken in previous years to reach their current data quality standards. And we understand the concerns about how quickly this can be lost (particularly when working remotely from less than ideal source documents) and the impact this may have on the morale of the team.Paid content portrait - 3M_204x307

Coders are conscientious by nature, striving to record the most accurate casemix for every patient because they understand the implications of poor-quality data.

The integrity of a trust’s representative data is important to the coding team, the wider trust and the NHS. Accurate coding will be vital for all parties to understand performance, not just for COVID-19 related activity, now and in the future. Benchmarking and national statistics may be paused for now, but will soon return to their former focus for the NHS.

Trusts will require a robust set of coded data to establish a better clinical understanding of COVID-19. It would be easier to code the minimum data set, especially if clinical coding teams are working remotely and activity increases. However, without a full list of recorded comorbidities, it will be more difficult to identify the full impact of this disease and which patients require the highest level of care.

Additionally, this pandemic has identified that the NHS has not had full diagnostic information available to fully support the response. Improving the quality of the data held at patient level must be a focus for the NHS in general and trusts in particular. In short, the NHS must have a better idea of who are the sickest, most vulnerable patients most likely to require immediate frontline support.

Therefore, until the end of July 2020 3M is offering to enable 3M Data Quality Analytics (DQA) and 3M Medical History Assurance (MHA) to use free of charge to support your trust in maintaining data quality during this crisis period.

Specifically designed to validate the assigned clinical coding and resultant healthcare resource group (HRG), 3M DQA works within the 3M Medicode Encoder to ensure accurate reimbursement while presenting real-time actionable data via a dashboard which is available to the trust coding and information management teams.

3M DQA focuses on:

  • Increased productivity of your existing coding team resource to allow processing of data as frequently as required
  • Supporting performance management of coding team through increased volume of episodes validated
  • Areas of weakness for targeted audit and validation based on highlighted risk
  • Revisiting of all or selected coded episodes against a range of validation points to quickly identify common coding errors
  • Identifying data quality improvements, which in turn support the outputs for training and benchmarking
  • Managing time pressure on trusts to meet clinical coding target dates, while maintaining accuracy and depth of clinical coding 

3M MHA has been facilitating the collection of comorbidities over the past three years and has a proven track record in supporting accurate casemix. We are offering the opportunity to use MHA to support the consistency of coding across the coding team.

3M MHA focuses on:

  • prompts to notify the coder during the coding process of previously recorded comorbidities. This reduces the incidence of data omission, enhances the reported casemix and improves the accuracy of the assigned HRG. When contracts are again based on the national tariff, this will also assure income
  • facilitating improvements in current and retrospective data quality, specifically in coding depth, and therefore improving the management, benchmarking and performance data including that used for mortality indicators
  • increasing productivity of your existing coding team resource
  • facilitating improvements in clinical documentation, data quality and clinician engagement
  • aligning to the NHS strategy ‘Getting It Right First Time’

We want to work collaboratively with your trust to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on data quality and believe that an effective first step is the implementation of 3M DQA and MHA.  Terms and Conditions available upon request.

Contact a member of the 3M Health Information Systems team to find out the right solution for you and your organisation: [email protected]