how is remote patient monitoring changing the game

Remote patient monitoring is a game changer during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Many questions have been brought up regarding the status of our current healthcare system. How can I get in touch with my physician? How are healthcare clinics handling social distancing and quarantine? Are they still able to meet with me? Do I have any symptoms of Coronavirus? How do I know whether I need to go to a hospital for testing?

Over the last few weeks, our healthcare environment has turned upside down by the emergence of Coronavirus in the United States. Serving patients during this time presents new challenges and has established a “new normal” for clinical workflows.

What exactly is Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM)?

Imagine you are experiencing some symptoms that you’d like your clinician to know about. Maybe you have some preexisting healthcare conditions that make you concerned. Remote patient monitoring allows your clinician to monitor your symptoms and reach out with any changes you should make to your current treatment plan. Most RPM platforms are online or through a mobile application that allow for secure communication with your healthcare provider from the comfort of your home.

cliexa utilizes Remote Patient Monitoring to improve patient care. The platform provides clinically validated assessments with automated disease activity scores, allowing clinicians to tap into wearable devices for real-time data. These wearables provide actionable data that otherwise could go undetected through general patient reported outcomes. This way of closely monitoring patients can lead to an improved patient satisfaction with overall care.

How can Remote Patient Monitoring help during the COVID-19 outbreak?

Remote patient monitoring with cliexa is changing the game in healthcare. Recently, many digital health companies have been working towards telehealth solutions for clinics. With cliexa’s remote patient monitoring, patients do not need to be physically present to onboard. Instead, they can receive care and information from a clinician with a fully remote platform. cliexa addresses the needs of each clinic’s specific Coronavirus response. cliexa enables remote check-in, customized clinical intake, secure transfer of medical history records, and remote patient monitoring. All of these functionalities in the platform seamlessly integrate into the existing EMR system. These functions allow patients to conduct all necessary actions from home on their mobile phones prior to telehealth or in-person visits.

Providers can leverage these services, along with cliexa’s COVID-19 screening, to triage patients with chronic conditions based on their risk level. The cliexa COVID-19 screening capabilities follow the CDC’s guidelines to assess risk factors for patients, including preexisting medical conditions. cliexa allows clinicians to utilize virtual health functionalities including remote monitoring and telemedicine visits.

How does Remote Patient Monitoring differ from Telehealth?

Telehealth allows for physicians to meet with their patients virtually – through video or audio communications. However, telehealth requires that patients have previously gone through an onboarding process with their specific clinic or physician. Many telehealth services still require patients to visit their healthcare provider’s office in-person for onboarding. During this initial office visit, the patient fills out onboarding documentation including waivers and past medical history documents. After all patient information is entered into the clinic’s EMR, only then can the patient enroll in telehealth functionalities.

This is where cliexa’s remote patient monitoring platform differs. Our platform eliminates this step completely. Clinics fully digitize the onboarding process and customize it to their specific clinic needs with cliexa. With remote check-in and customized clinical intake features, patients can enroll with a clinic of their choice and start using telehealth services safely from home. This eliminates the need for an initial in-person visit with a healthcare provider, reducing COVID-19 exposure in hospitals and clinics.

How can I learn more?

During this chaotic time, it’s important to stay informed with what’s happening in our current healthcare system. Using remote patient monitoring in healthcare today is outlined in online articles released almost daily. Participate in webinars to learn more about what digital healthcare companies are doing to help – and review materials like this on your own.

cliexa is determined to do all we can to help healthcare providers overcome challenges and promote better care for patients. To support our healthcare partners through this pandemic, we are waiving all implementation fees until further notice. COVID-19 has distanced us, but with the right tools the show can and must go on.

For more information, check out our brief explainer video or schedule a demo of the cliexa platform with our team here.

Digital Health Solutions for Compliance and Reimbursement

The Problem

With healthcare reform sweeping our nation, many hospitals and clinical practices are prioritizing compliance to rules, regulations, and laws of healthcare, in order to streamline operations while providing safe, high-quality patient care. Oversight of compliance is managed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Inspector General (OIG). Physicians and their staff face increasing scrutiny when it comes to documentation, coding compliance, and the auditing process conducted by Medicare Recovery Audit Contractors (RACs) and private payers. The combined effects of a national shift towards value-based care and reducing costs have inevitably led to payers auditing more aggressively to identify potential overpayments. In the 2018 Comprehensive Error Rate Testing (CERT) report, the Medicare fee-for-service program documented an improper payment rate at 8.12 percent, representing $31.62 billion in improper payments (5). Common causes of improper payments include:

  • 58% due to insufficient documentation
  • 21.3% due to unnecessary medical proceeding
  • 11.9% due to incorrect coding
  • 2.6% due to lack of documentation
  • 6.3% due to other

Physicians and healthcare providers now face increasing pressure to get documentation right while delivering quality patient care. This shift creates a need for a robust cross-communication platform like cliexa, to foster collaboration between patients, providers, payers, and key stakeholders involved in the healthcare system in order to quantify and qualify patient-reported outcomes (PRO). As seen in the breakdown above, over 70% of improper payments are due to documentation errors or services deemed medically unnecessary.

Documentation Issues

Any healthcare professional who uses electronic medical records (EMRs) with auto-populating templates such as, but not limited to, a quick click-through of a review of organ systems (ROS) template that may not have been fully reviewed or has a default entry, is at risk for audit. For example, a patient can be seen professionally for having back pain, yet the musculoskeletal ROS was documented as negative when it should have said “low back pain.” This is a red flag to the auditor and prompts them to look for other inconsistencies. Errors can also occur during billing and coding, however, CPT and ICD-10 coding errors are less prevalent when documentation is adequate (6).

With cliexa, a substantial portion of the ROS, medical history, family history, and social history can be streamlined into the EMR from the comfort of the patient’s home or shortly before the physician sees the patient. This function will close the gap in clerical errors and serve as a safety net for when a provider forgets to elicit additional questions from the patient during the encounter or enter it into their notes.

It only takes on average 30 encounters of an ICD-10 code reported that was not supported in the physician’s note, or coding one level higher than they should have, to be audited. Medicare or the insurance company (payer) will ask for approximately $45,000 back, yet the actual amount paid will amount to over $1 million after accounting for interest, extraneous fees, and penalties (6). Those who code for a lower level of services or have smaller practices may believe they will not be audited since they are taking the low-risk approach, however, that is far from the truth. Auditing occurs because they identify the physician as an outlying practitioner compared to colleagues in the same specialty nearby. For example, a physician consistently bills level 4 and 5 services, while colleagues are billing mostly level 3 care, raises a red flag.

Even with an active body overseeing clinical documentation improvement (CDI) in the hospital and frequent educational sessions, these errors still persist. The demands on physicians and mid-level providers can get overwhelming, splitting their time between treating patients at increasing volumes and endless documentation despite the adoption of EMRs. Eventually, something gives. The trends show physicians improve significantly in the immediate 6 month period after billing training sessions, and unfortunately, often revert back to the same pattern of minimally edited or rushed medical notes (6).

As shown above, in the CERT report, services deemed medically unnecessary falls in the second most common cause of payment retraction. Having a strong patient medical history component in the physicians’ note lays the foundations for justification for office visits, labs, or imaging services rendered. It will naturally defend the need for such services. This is where cliexa comes in, allowing patients to fill out clinical assessments outside the hospital or clinic walls. This is especially important for chronic care management (CCM) patients because we can capture the trend of the patient’s disease progression, using reliable and objective data. As data accrues while a patient documents their symptoms improving or worsening, clinicians can intervene or change management as necessary. When further lab work or imaging is necessary, it will already be justified and deemed “medically necessary” with trending data, thus decreasing the potential for billing rejections from payers. This real-time data is sent directly to the Cloud and then to the clinician’s EMR system, with no disruption in workflow.

Another common issue occurs during documentation of the chief complaint and history of present illness (HPI) in the patient’s medical record. For example, a CCM patient with rheumatoid arthritis has been under your care for a couple of years. It is not sufficient to say “patient is here for a follow-up visit” as the chief complaint. The status of the patient must be further explained, such as comparisons made to previous visits: are they improving, worsening, stable, or well-controlled, as a result of any medications? The HPI is a section in the patient’s medical note that requires the physician to document, not ancillary staff such as nurses or medical assistants. An auditor will review the HPI and grade it in two levels: brief or extended.

  • Brief HPI, 1-3 HPI elements
    • “Patient is here for arm (location) pain that started a week ago (duration)”
  • Extended HPI, 4+ HPI elements
    • “Patient is here for waxing and waning (timing), arm pain (location) that started a week ago (duration). He states it is a constant ache (quality) type pain that worsens when he wakes up (provoking factor).

Leaving out important parts of the documentation will lead to a lower level of service in billing and lower reimbursements. To mitigate this issue, cliexa offers screening and compliance tools that are already integrated on the platform.

Evaluation & Management Audit

A major pitfall in an audited record of high concern for the HHS and OIG stems from EMRs “assisting” physicians and mid-level providers with coding and documentation prompts. Most EMRs come with a feature that supports accurate evaluation and management coding, yet they can also cause inaccurate coding. Often times, the EMR does not have the ability to identify key data elements related to complex medical-decision making (MDM), which is alarming when it comes down to identifying the most accurate E&M code to use. Common mistakes made by the EMR system include:

  • Inaccurate level of service calculation (E&M codes) based on content in the documentation
  • Inability to create content and set system defaults
  • Inability to automatically detect a conflict between the information in the HPI and the ROS section

Understanding the inner workings of the EMR as well as optimizing its billing elements requires extensive time that physicians and HCPS do not have. As such, an over-reliance on the EMR’s suggested E&M code develops, which leads to unintentional upcoding or down-coding. Many providers believe that using the EMR-provided code would protect them from coding at a level not supported by documentation or medical necessity. Compensation may rise at first, but end up in payment retractions from payers or increase their risk for fraud. For example, if a patient comes for a follow-up visit, it is not necessary to include the 12-system ROS or family history of this patient, as it was already detailed in the initial consultation note. This can trigger the EMR to suggest a higher coding level, which is not justified. Physicians need an automated process that can quickly categorize the nature of the visit, which is offered in the cliexa platform with our coding compliance programming.

Medical Decision-Making (MDM)

The MDM portion of the E&M record makes up the criteria for the visit code physicians bill. In other words, it is more important than the history and exam portion of the physician’s note. MDM constitutes the complexity of the diagnosis and/or creating a management plan. From the desk of the auditor, these factors include:

  • The number of possible diagnoses and/or the number of management options that must be considered
  • Amount or complexity of medical records, diagnostic tests, and/or other information that must be ordered, reviewed and analyzed
  • The risk of complications, morbidity, or mortality and associated comorbidities related to the patient’s presenting chief complaint, diagnostics and management options (6)

In order to qualify for a given type of MDM (Straightforward, Low Complexity, Moderate Complexity, High Complexity), at least 2 out of the 3 elements listed above must be met. Each tier has its own designations under each element. For example, straightforward has a minimal or established problem that is stable and improved for a number of possible diagnoses. Whereas low complexity would have a low number of possible diagnoses or established problem that is worsening. cliexa has compliance measures built into the platform to ensure patients actually qualify for the right codes. You can also build in custom screening tools, such as a CCM patient with 2+ chronic conditions. At the same time, the physician can collect clinical metrics and compliance data through our system that directly integrates to your MIPs quality reports in the EMR. MIPs, which stands for Merit-based Incentive Payment System, is CMS’ largest value-based care payment program, which was adopted to shift the healthcare industry from fee-for-service to pay-for-value. There is a public reporting aspect of MIPs that impacts a clinician’s reputation as well as reimbursements: better MIPs score results in higher payments. It’s important to note that if one does not submit data for MIPs, there will be up to 5% reduction of Medicare reimbursements; this process is automated in our platform.

The compliance aspect of a clinician’s life cycle is complicated and frustrating, to say the least. That is why our platform can offer solutions to maximize your patient-facing time. Many aspects of the office visit require filling out surveys or patient information that ends up taking more time than the visit itself. cliexa brings increased efficiency to your practice by:

  • Streamlining the documentation aspect via integration with EMR for audit protection and compliance
  • Improve physician-patient communication
  • Allow customizable built-in surveys and questionnaires to improve your MIPs score

References

 

cliexa is a semifinalist in the AHRQ's Step-Up Challenge

cliexa is a semifinalist in the AHRQ's Step-Up Challenge

cliexa is one of 10 companies out of 50+ advancing to Phase 2 of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)‘s Step-Up App Challenge with the “goal of developing an app that integrates standardized patient-reported outcomes (PRO) data into clinical care and research.”

For Phase 2 of the Step Up App Challenge, cliexa will design, develop, and demo our application using the FHIR technical specifications and PROMIS® resources for patient-reported outcomes with the hope to be selected as one of the three winners, who will get the opportunity to test their product in nine practice settings affiliated with MedStar Health in Washington, DC.

Read the blog announcing the 10 semifinalists from Director of the AHRQ, Gopal Khanna, M.B.A: https://www.ahrq.gov/news/blog/ahrqviews/stepup-challenge-finalists.html

Check out our portfolio of patient-reported outcomes applications: cliexa Mobile

cliexa PTSI Press Release

We are proud to announce that we have officially joined forces with Preventative Technology Solutions, who will now become apart of the cliexa family.

Here is the link to the press release about the acquisition: //www.pr.com/press-release/768313

 

Digital health benefits

2018 has seen a significant boom in the application of technology in digital health innovation, which are poised to disrupt the healthcare industry. Innovations have included advances in mobile health (mHealth), health information technology (IT), as well as wearable and Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices.

cliexa has identified six specific areas of medicine already reaping the benefits of digital health innovation:

1. Rheumatology

Disease Activity Scoring (DAS) metrics remotely collected by cliexa from patients are used by physicians in their offices when assessing the severity of rheumatoid arthritis through a Q & A approach. cliexa empowers patients with the ability to communicate their patient-reported outcomes to their physicians at the touch of a finger, on their own mobile devices, providing physicians with instantly-scored clinically-validated assessments. The application of cliexa innovations in rheumatology drastically increases the efficiency and quality-of-care for both patients and their providers.

Check out the cliexa mobile platform for Rheumatoid Arthritis, cliexa-RA: //www.cliexa.com/cliexamobile/rheumatoid-arthritis/

2. Pain Management, Primary Care, & Integrative Medicine

Chronic pain, affecting over 10% of American adults, is a leading cause of opiate abuse. Managing and overcoming chronic pain is a complex obstacle for many healthcare providers. With the increased shift away from the prescribing of opioids in the treatment of chronic pain, cliexa enables providers to remotely monitors opioid-prescribed patients while empowering them to relay their patient-reported outcomes and track their mental health conditions in association with their chronic pain, while catering specifically towards the individual needs of each patient-provider relationship.

Check out the cliexa mobile platform for Pain Management, cliexa-EASE: //www.cliexa.com/cliexamobile/pain-management/

3. Behavioral Health & Addiction Treatment

Though struggles with addiction are becoming increasingly more prevalent in society, the present methods of addiction treatment are limited. Through innovations in health technologies, patients and providers are shifting towards new ways of treating addiction. The monitoring of patients in real-time is essential for positive treatment outcomes for both patients and their providers. By leveraging patient-reported data, patients adhere to their treatment plans and overcome addiction as a disease, rather than as a fault.

Check out the cliexa mobile platform for Behavioral Health, cliexa-SENSE: //www.cliexa.com/cliexamobile/behavioral-health/

4. Digestive Health

Through cliexa innovations, providers better manage chronic gastrointestinal diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease or ulcerative colitis, using specifically-designed, highly-structured treatment plans that leverage disease activity scoring models taken from qualitative patient responses to assessments which quantify and track symptoms over long periods of time.

Check out the cliexa mobile platform for Digestive Health, cliexa-IBD: //www.cliexa.com/cliexamobile/inflammatory-bowel-disease/

5. Respiratory Care

cliexa enables providers to qualitatively track chronic diseases of the respiratory system, like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), through remote patient-reported outcomes. The ability to structure individualized and specialized care leads to improved patient-provider experiences.

Check out the cliexa mobile platform for Respiratory Care, cliexa-COPD: //www.cliexa.com/cliexamobile/chronic-obstructive-pulmonary-disease/

6. Pediatric Care

cliexa health technology drives innovations in mental health resiliency in adolescents, a hot topic in today’s health community. cliexa’s clinically validated medical assessment applications, coupled with its mHealth prevention services, help providers identify and reduce risk behaviors in adolescents and young adults. cliexa’s mobile patient-engagement applications equip providers with the tools adolescents use to overcome anxiety and depression, increasing the overall quality-of-care for both patients and providers.

Check out the cliexa mobile platform for Pediatric Care, cliexa-OPTIONS: //www.cliexa.com/cliexamobile/adolescent-resiliency/