Background

Lack of effective tools that measure Physicians performance presents a major obstacle in improving quality and health care cost in the US. Existing approaches are either not geared towards in-patient visits or rely on expensive tools that are claims-based and are entirely dependent on accurate/ timely billing. Therefore, an effective tool that identifies, measures and evaluates physicians performance is necessary to drive various healthcare agencies initiative of improving care quality and cost efficiency.

Technology

Clinical health practitioners and computer scientists at Stony Brook University have developed a computational software, called Attribution Manager Software, that uses data stored in Electronic Health Record (EHR), to accurately execute physician attribution. The software runs an algorithm, which assigns scores to each physician who provides care to a patient based on their clinical notes and assigns that patient to the physician receiving maximum score. A recent study showed that use of the Attribution Manager Software, resulted in reassignment of 64% of cases as compared to that observed using an alternative Germane Logic model (37%). The model is operational in Stony Brook Medicine (SBM) since 2013, and has been in use for improving the healthcare outcomes at SBM. Further Details: A Physician Attribution Model for Inpatient Care ICHI 14 Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics Pages 89-94, September 15-17, 2014.

Advantages

- A robust and accurate (97% precision rate) physician attribution model for inpatient care. - Learning algorithm based on user feedback allows for continuous improvement. - Provides daily feed of discharged patient data to administrators. - Captures all physician and physician extender activity. Research to capture their quality outcome is ongoing.

Application

Health Care IT.