Analytics Drive Malnutrition Management Improvement, Increasing Reimbursement and Enhancing Patient Care

THE CHALLENGE

Up to fifty percent of hospitalized patients in the U.S. suffer from malnutrition, but it is often unnoticed without systematic screening. Orlando Health’s clinical nutrition department wanted to optimize hospitalized patients’ nutrition status. However, burdensome manual data review processes and poor data quality hindered the prompt identification of patients in need of screening and those at risk.

THE SOLUTION

Leveraging the Health Catalyst^® data platform, Orlando Health improved the identification of patients at risk for malnutrition. The organization can quickly identify patients’ malnutrition screening status and patients who would benefit from registered dietitian services.

Orlando Health can easily monitor documentation specificity and accuracy, and intervene to ensure clinical documentation accurately reflects patient complexity, including malnutrition diagnoses. In addition, the organization can capture the financial impact of the diagnosis as the primary driver of additional reimbursement. 

With improved access to high-quality data and analytics, Orlando Health can evaluate the impact of malnutrition on crucial outcomes like length of stay, mortality, and 30-day readmissions, as well as differences in outcomes related to social determinants of health. The organization uses outcomes data to engage frontline care teams in increasing the number of patients screened for malnutrition.

THE RESULT

Orlando Health increased the number of patients screened for malnutrition, improved the number of patients who receive registered dietitian services and interventions, optimized nutrition status and patient outcomes, and increased reimbursement.

• $1.9M reimbursement increase over 11 months, the result of improved malnutrition management and increased accuracy and specificity of clinical documentation.
• $60K annual costs avoided, the results of automating data abstraction, aggregation, and reporting.
• 73 percent adherence rate to evidence-based malnutrition screening recommendations.

“The Health Catalyst data platform has been instrumental in helping us evaluate and communicate the impact of malnutrition on patient outcomes, supporting our ongoing efforts to increase malnutrition screening and provide early medical nutrition therapy to those patients at nutritional risk.”

Chelsea Santiago, MS, RD, LDN, CDCES, Clinical Nutrition Manager, Orlando Health

ADDITIONAL READING

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• Data-Driven Operations Improve ED Efficiency
• Data Accessibility and Analytics Enables Data-Driven Emergency Care
• Integrated Data Enables Single Source of Truth and Rapid Adoption
• Integrated Healthcare Data Quickly Enables Adaptive, Purpose Driven Analytics