My wife is a doctor at a major university. They are under pressure right now and are looking to increase revenue. Changing the way they document cases can substantially alter the billing outcome. Note that these are not errors, they are omissions of work done in the note that prevents the downstream billing experts from using higher paying codes.

They have been aware for a few years that many clinicians aren’t documenting their work in the best way for billing. The current solution is to have an annual talk given by the one billing expert in their department pointing out where people often lose revenue due to poor documentation.

Not all the doctors attend this talk. There is no internal process for measuring subsequent improvements quantitatively. There are 85 doctors in her group.

Anyway, this is just to say that something automated to help doctors document their work in a billing friendly way seems powerful. But for my wife’s group, the issue doesn’t seem to be denied claims or “errors” per se. More omissions/sub optimal documentation due to lack of knowledge. Or lack of follow through on knowledge which is only occasionally communicated.