Quality improvement project to reduce medicare 1-day write-offs due to inappropriate admission orders

TL;DR

This study shows that using a Best Practice Alert in electronic medical records can significantly reduce Medicare 1-day write-offs by ensuring correct patient status designation.

Contribution

This is the first known use of a Best Practice Alert to reduce Medicare 1-day write-offs by improving inpatient/outpatient designation.

Findings

The intervention group had 16.7% inpatient designation potentially inappropriate, compared to 57.5% in the control group (p=0.001).

Estimated write-offs dropped from 73.9% in the control group to 12.5% in the intervention group.

Abstract

We identified that Stanford Health Care had a significant number of patients who after discharge are found by the utilization review committee not to meet Center for Mediare and Medicaid Services (CMS) 2-midnight benchmark for inpatient status. Some of the charges incurred during the care of these patients are written-off and known as Medicare 1-day write-offs. This study which aims to evaluate the use of a Best Practice Alert (BPA) feature on the electronic medical record, EPIC, to ensure appropriate designation of a patient’s hospitalization status as either inpatient or outpatient in accordance with Center for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS) 2 midnight length of stay benchmark thereby reducing the number of associated write-offs.

We incorporated a best practice alert (BPA) into the Epic Electronic Medical Record (EMR) that would prompt the discharging provider and the case manager to review the patients’ inpatient designation prior to discharge and change the patient’s designation to observation when deemed appropriate. Patients who met the inclusion criteria (Patients must have Medicare fee-for-service insurance, inpatient length of stay (LOS) less than 2 midnights, inpatient designation as hospitalization status at time of discharge, was hospitalized to an acute level of care and belonged to one of 37 listed hospital services at the time of signing of the discharge order) were randomized to have the BPA either silent or active over a three-month period from July 18, 2019, to October 18, 2019.

A total of 88 patients were included in this study: 40 in the control arm and 48 in the intervention arm. In the intervention arm, 8 (8/48, 16.7%) had an inpatient status designation despite potentially meeting Medicare guidelines for an observation stay, comparing to 23 patients (23/40, 57.5%) patients in the control group (p = 0.001). The estimated number of write-offs in the control arm was 17 (73.9%, out of 23 inpatient patients) while in the intervention arm was 1 (12.5%, out of 8 inpatient patient) after accounting for patients who may have met inpatient criteria for other reasons based on case manager note review.

This is the first time to our knowledge that a BPA has been used in this manner to reduce the number of Medicare 1-day write-offs.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12913-024-10594-z.

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