Reducing the Reported Mortality Index Within a Neurocritical Care Unit Through Documentation and Coding Accuracy.

BACKGROUND:The mortality index, or the ratio of observed to expected mortality, is a reported quality metric that has been assumed to directly reflect patient care. However, documentation and coding that does not use knowledge of how a reported mortality index is derived could reflect poorly on a hospital or service line. We present our effort at reducing the reported mortality index of neurosurgery and neurology patients within a neurocritical care unit through documentation and coding accuracy with direct incorporation of mortality modeling.METHODS:Using a reported method from Vizient Inc., we generated a spreadsheet tool to enable direct manipulation of the data to identify documentation and coding issues that influenced the reported mortality index in a retrospective set of patients. Subsequently, we implemented the prospective changes to documentation and coding and compared our calculated mortality index to the reported Vizient mortality index.RESULTS:Prospective implementation of the documentation and coding issues identified through our spreadsheet tool resulted in a drastic reduction of both our calculated and the reported Vizient mortality index.CONCLUSIONS:Incorporating knowledge of mortality index modeling into the documentation and coding resulted in impressive reductions in the reported mortality index for our patients, serving as a both an internal benchmark and a method of comparison with other institutions.