The Case for Efficiency - More Documentation Isn't Always Better

Overview

In the world of physical therapy, striking the right balance between compliant patient documentation while remaining efficient is critical. Physical therapy clinics, like any medical practice, grapple with this challenge daily. 

PredictionHealth's AI tool, Practice Intel, analyzes 100% of your therapy notes in your EMR, giving you actionable insights into compliance, CPT coding, and more. As of this writing, PredictionHealth has analyzed over 12 million patient notes so far, enabling us to identify unprecedented industry trends. As we process more and more data, we'll be able to draw more correlations like the one described in this post. We plan to post them here as we identify them!

One such trend is the intriguing 5,000-character threshold, the point after which the compliance benefits of writing more documentation begin to diminish.

The 5,000 Character Threshold

The above scatter plot displays the number of characters (letters and numbers) in a note versus PredictionHealth's audit score. The lower the audit score, the more likely you will fail an audit based on your documentation quality. Each dot is a note we used in this analysis.

As expected, the audit score improves with increasing note length, but only up to around 5,000 characters, after which you see the returns diminish. This chart clearly shows that there is a "sweet spot" in documentation length and compliance. Why take hours to write 10,000 or 20,000 characters when you only stand to gain a few more audit score points?

Efficient documentation practices may be just as important as note quality. Spending more time than needed on documentation can be a major contributing factor to things like provider burnout, documentation errors, and loss of productive time. Being more efficient also frees up time for clinicians to focus on their patients. By reducing the administrative burden, they can provide better care and strengthen patient relationships. Utilizing PredictionHealth's PT Practice Intel allows you to do just that by tracking over / under documentation, copy forward rates, compliance scores, and more. 

PredictionHealth is revolutionizing the analysis of physical therapy documentation data. By leveraging insights from over 12 million patient notes and counting, our AI technology will continue to offer valuable, actionable industry insights. We look forward to sharing more with you! 

If you'd like to see how our AI tool can help you ensure compliance, efficiency, and revenue optimization, reach out to us here!