In a recent Emerging Technology Spotlight report, KLAS Research found that provider organizations who are using CorroHealth’s autonomous coding product are highly satisfied with the solution’s functionality and that it has had a positive impact on their operations.
Healthcare IT Today had the opportunity to sit down with the report’s lead author – Mac Boyter, Research Director at KLAS – to find out more.
The Right Time
Autonomous coding – the use of natural language processing and other AI technologies to “read” clinical documentation to create billing-reading codes – has the potential to streamline the HIM processes at healthcare organizations. As HIM professionals become more difficult to hire and retain, more organizations are considering adopting autonomous coding solutions, like what CorroHealth offers (see: Autonomous Coding: It’s Not About Cost Reduction. It’s About Improving Revenue).
“This [autonomous coding] is something that is extremely timely right now,” said Boyter. “This has, over the last few years, become more and more top of mind. It’s an area that is seeing tremendous growth.”
Fueling that growth, in part, is an increasing recognition of the impact that this technology can have.
High Impact
When asked, Boyter had this to say about the impact of the technology: “The organizations that we spoke to for this report, highlighted CorroHealth’s autonomous coding solution for the impact it had on not just on the bottom line, but on the quality of life for clinicians.”
50% of the organizations surveyed as part of the report saw positive outcomes from the technology immediately. The other 50% saw positive outcomes within 6 months. This short time-to-value will help accelerate the adoption of the technology in the years ahead.
All the organizations reported a reduction in the amount of manual coding needed once the CorroHealth solution was implemented. “For what we get from using the system, it has value,” said a Director from a healthcare organization that participated in the report. “CorroHealth has saved us money. We were able to create a less expensive solution.”
Needed Functionality
There were two categories where CorroHealth’s autonomous coding solution scored an A+: Likely to Recommend and Product has needed functionality.
For the Likely to Recommend category, Boyter made the following comment: “100% of the people we spoke with said yes, they would recommend CorroHealth’s solutions. We didn’t have anyone who said ‘no’, which is pretty unusual.”
For the Product has needed functionality category, Boyter pointed to a quote from a Director at one of the healthcare organizations they polled for the report: “The product 100% works as promoted. The technology is pretty impressive. Previously, we had someone touch the accounts and make sure the coding was correct. We found out that out of hundreds of claims, only a couple of them needed to be changed. We realized that there wasn’t any value in reviewing the product’s work.”
Bottom Line
The main message from the report is that autonomous coding and in particular, CorroHealth’s solution is ready for prime time. The technology is not an interesting experiment in AI. It produces tangible results and has high impact on the HIM operations of healthcare organizations. It also impacts the bottom line.
“Autonomous coding is here to stay,” stated Boyter. “It’s something providers should pay attention to if they haven’t already looked for it. You need to be aware of what’s coming down the pipe because it’s going to be here sooner than we think.”
Watch the full interview with Mac Boyter to learn:
- How autonomous coding eliminates working during “pajama time”
- Why the audit trail capability was an unexpected benefit to users
- What the end of AI-hype means for the adoption of the technology in healthcare
Download the Emerging Technology Spotlight Report: www.corrohealth.com/KLAS
Learn more about KLAS Research: https://klasresearch.com/
Learn more about CorrroHealth: https://corrohealth.com/
Listen and subscribe to the Healthcare IT Today Interviews Podcast to hear all the latest insights from experts in healthcare IT.
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CorroHealth is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.
Transcript
[00:00:31] Colin Hung: Hello and welcome to Healthcare IT Today where we explore the latest healthcare technology trends and discover valuable insights in health IT. I’m Colin Hung and joining me today is Mac Boyter, Research Director at KLAS…yes that KLAS…as in best in KLAS. You see their logo and their name plastered everywhere when we go to conferences. Mac, love having you on the program. Welcome.
[00:00:56] Mac Boyter: Thank you Colin, super excited to be here.
[00:01:00] Colin Hung: What I wanted to talk to you about is a new Spotlight Report that featured CorroHealth that just came out and it was centered on something called the autonomous coding. But before we dive into the meat of that report, can you help our audience understand what that technology actually is?
[00:01:22] Mac Boyter: Absolutely. This is something that is extremely timely right now. We at KLAS have measured for many years, areas around what we call documentation – everything from transcription and scribing, whether at the elbow or virtual scribing, to things like ambient speech solutions like Nuance Stacks, et cetera. And now it’s autonomous coding. This has, over the last few years, become more and more top of mind. It’s an area that is seeing tremendous growth.
[00:01:50] Colin Hung: So it’s sort of an ambient voice-like technology? Sorry, I misunderstood that.
[00:01:56] Mac Boyter: Great question. So if you look at the continuum where there is lower technology and more human intervention on the continuum from one scale to the other end of the continuum or a spectrum where it’s less human intervention and more technology, again, it would kind of go from transcription, scribing areas like that over to what we consider to be more autonomous coding solutions and then at the far end, truly autonomous ambient speech solutions that are pulling the data directly from the provider interaction, et cetera, with some human intervention still. However,
[00:02:30] Colin Hung: What are some of the benefits and outcomes that provider organization saw from using this kind of technology?
[00:02:41] Mac Boyter: So this is something that is obviously top of mind. As providers come to KLAS, what they ask is “what is the bottom line”? Outcomes is really what drives adoptio, it drives satisfaction. Conversely, if they’re not achieving outcomes, they want financial improvements or decreased clinician burnout – things like that. If they don’t have those tangible outcomes, that really does drive the dissatisfaction.
[00:03:02] The organizations that we spoke to for this report, they really highlighted CorroHealth’s autonomous coding solution for the impact it had on not just on the bottom line, in terms of financials and making it easier for them to do these transcriptions of interactions and so on.
[00:03:21] It really allowed them to have better quality of life for the clinicians and these professionals who, as we all know through the last couple of years, have had an incredible burden placed upon them. So this is something that health systems are paying more attention to because the cost of replacing a clinician or physician is incredibly high.
[00:03:43] So anything you can do to help remove the burden, remove a little bit of pajama time as we like to call it. For clinicians after post encounter, really trying to recapitulate what they were doing and cleaning up their own notes is extremely important and very important for the health systems that we spoke with.
[00:04:00] Colin Hung: This is a technology that sounds like it really can help a clinician save time,. You called it pajama time – when they have to document or review what they put into the system, the autonomous coding seems to be able to help a lot with that.
[00:04:19] Mac Boyter: Immensely, depending on who we speak with within the organization. One of the neat things about this report is that people on the ground, so to speak – so actual physicians, themselves utilizing the solution, got their perspective of how it impacted them. Then we also spoke with higher-level folks within the organization, you know, CEOs, CFOs who are looking at the broader picture throughout the organization.
[00:04:41] And of course the financial aspect as health systems are squeezed, they’re looking at their elective procedures which are still not totally recovered…high deductible plans are high…How do they keep the lights on, so to speak and pay their bills. It’s important that they are able to do that in the most cost-effective efficient way possible.
[00:04:59] We love the outcomes we saw focused on that. And we’re positive there.
[00:05:04] Colin Hung: Were there any outcomes that you heard when you did those interviews that surprised you from these providers?
[00:05:14] Mac Boyter: I’m glad you asked that Colin. So one of the things that we ask at KLAS is: “what were the outcomes either positive or challenges and did you have any unexpected outcomes?”
[00:05:25] My hypothesis, my theorem, which I was disabused of once we got the data, which is the best part of a hypothesis, right…when you’re proven wrong a little bit, and you go into it thinking one thing, but the data shows something else.
[00:05:37] We talked specifically about the type of analytics that the solutions behind it, the technology behind it, the ability to do an audit data trail to see from the beginning of the visit all the way through an inpatient stay, being able to track that was extremely valuable to the health system.
[00:05:56] As they look at, how do we decrease AR how do we increase that revenue? And of course, along with the quadruple aim of healthcare, how do we increase the patient experience? So they have better outcomes. The health outcomes of that patient are improved.
[00:06:09] I mean, as you can imagine, Colin, let’s say you go in for a procedure, maybe it’s the same day and the doctor codes, the information. It goes through incorrectly and you get prescribed a medication that is not accurate or has a contra-indication to an existing medication. That can have a serious and even life-threatening impact on you. So making sure that the coding is done accurately, properly, that there’s an audit trail to follow that up, and then the providers can go back in and they can look at these dashboards.
[00:06:37] One of the things that I think surprised some of these providers was these operationalized dashboards. So they could see the actual appreciable impact on the clinician workflow, the efficiencies, some of those things.
[00:06:49] And they shared that that was extremely helpful. They didn’t expect it and they didn’t know to expect it, but there was a major benefit.
[00:06:56] Colin Hung: I gotta be honest, you’d think we have enough dashboards in healthcare…we have a lot of them, but it sounds like this one in particular was actually useful not only on the audit side, but also helping them identify some issues and problems that they could go and address.
[00:07:16] Mac Boyter: That’s right. And thank you for bringing that up. That’s exactly the unexpected outcome. So they knew that they were getting a dashboard which to your point is fairly ubiquitous, but the differentiation was the ability for them to go in and kind of highlight and identify core issues or inefficiencies of workflows, et cetera, as bottlenecks, and be able to unwind that operationally within the organization as to how we could do that.
[00:07:39] It ended up contributing to when we asked these providers “would you buy this again if you knew what you knew now?” 100% of the people we spoke with said yes. We didn’t have anyone who said “no”, which is pretty unusual.
[00:07:51] Typically we’ll have somebody who is like “ah, it could have been better” or this or that. In this case, it wasn’t a perfect implementation. There were some challenges here and there. Integration was one of the questions that people had about long-term, but I think CorroHealth has really taken what was already a strong functional solution, and they’re improving upon it.
[00:08:13] And that’s one of the things that we heard from providers as well which I thought was interesting.
[00:08:17] Colin Hung: Now in this report, you gave a CorroHealth an A+ when it came to having the needed functionality for autonomous coding…I have to ask what are those needed functions for autonomous coding?
[00:08:31] Mac Boyter: Well, and to be clear, Colin, you’re right, the report said that…I didn’t give it to them. KLAS doesn’t give out scores. I know it’s nitpicky, but this is the provider’s voice.
[00:08:41] So we always say, look if the score is not great, then I can say, the provider that said that, not me, and I’m blameless. No, I’m kidding. But KLAS really does just try to articulate the voice, but you’re right.
[00:08:52] When it comes to needed functionality, it really came down to those three things are they seeing.,, Actually I’ll just share with you a quick quote about one of the needed functionalities: “The product works a hundred percent has promoted. The technology is pretty impressive. Previously, we had someone touch the accounts, make sure the coding was correct. We found out that out of hundreds of claims, only a couple of them needed to be changed. We realized there wasn’t any value in reviewing the product’s work because it was so seamless”.
[00:09:22] So really when it comes down to it, if you have a Director of HIM or a VP of Revenue Cycle or a CMA or a CFO, what they really want to know is: does this time off my schedule.? Does this take a burden off my plate? Is it helping not just on the clinician level, but is it helping us operationally? Especially with staffing such a huge issue nowadays. The Great Resignation affected healthcare like it has everything else. Early retirement. People are looking at repurposing within the organization.
[00:09:50] Anything that helps that organization take workflow off of them is a huge outcome, probably the most important outcome. And then of course, accuracy. Making sure it’s tuned properly. Like we talked about a moment ago, that would be very, very important.
[00:10:04] And then the last thing is: is this actually worth cost-to-yield? So we’re investing in something but like anything else we have to show that there’s a renumerative value proposition. And in every case that we spoke with, the providers, did say that there was that value there.
[00:10:21] Colin Hung: Let’s maybe take a step back for a moment if I can Mac. And let’s talk about a macro trend that I’m seeing, and that is…staffing has become a critical challenge in healthcare right now. AI technologies prior to the pandemic were viewed a little bit skeptically, and as sort of an enemy. It was like: “I don’t want AI because that could actually cost jobs”. But now with what’s happening, I find that AI is now looked to as potentially a helper.
[00:10:56] You’re talking about autonomous coding which has an element of AI here and it is helping with that transcribing from the record to create codes for reimbursement. Are you seeing the same thing right now?
[00:11:15] Mac Boyter: First of all, I could not agree more with what you just said. I think there was the ubiquity and the overuse of the term “AI” robbed it of a lot of validity. It became this buzz term that everybody was bandying about and saying, “oh, we’ve got AI that powers this” or “AI that’s behind the scenes of this”. It almost became a “me too”. If you didn’t include AI in your quote unquote, value proposition, providers would go, “oh well, they’re not very forward-thinking” or “they’re not innovative and whatnot” or at least that was the perception of vendor organizations and service solutions.
[00:11:52] I think, thankfully, we’re actually seeing a bit of an ebb in that. As it’s sorting itself out in terms of okay look, this is just a screen scraping we’ve had for 13 years. This is the same old, same old, or this is truly a machine learning is something very new and innovative. But yeah, to your point, it was a boogeyman.
[00:12:13] The rough analogy would be outsourcing, like offshore work, where it was the boogeyman taking away from domestic coding jobs or other jobs. And offshoring was seen as a negative. And of course there were questions around security and compliance and so on.
[00:12:30] And then over time from the ICD-9 to ICD-10 transition, we saw that rise and fall, and now it’s more commoditized. People recognize and appreciate that it really isn’t that bad. You can still have onshore resources with offshore working in tandem or complimentary. I think we’re going to see something similar when it comes to AI,
[00:12:47] Where once it was going to replace us all, it was going to kick us all out of the job. It was going to reduce our staff…and now its what we need. We need to replace staff because of the retirements or the Great Resignation, things like that.
[00:13:01] Colin Hung: It sounds like to me, this autonomous coding is a very practical application of AI. So unlike the hype we were under a little bit before where some over-promising was made, this sounds like it’s actually very practical and has some real world benefits that, you’ve uncovered and that you have verified through your interviews with these providers.
[00:13:25] Mac Boyter: It absolutely has. And again, providers are savvy. They’re very smart. Clinicians are extremely intelligent. They recognize where they’ve been sold a bill of goods. And so I think there’s a natural level of inherent skepticism. So when we do talk with providers and they eulogize the process, they talk about it. I think that that speaks volumes.
[00:13:46] In terms of…it impacts my life, I’m able to spend time with my family. We have one provider who literally said I’m able to actually see my family – I haven’t seen them very much over the last two years and this has had an impact and given me a little bit about my life back.
[00:14:01] This is the kind of impact that KLAS takes very seriously. We are mission-driven at KLAS. We focus on helping providers and organizations learn what’s real from the not real. This is a big part of our mission.
[00:14:15] Colin Hung: Mac. if someone is going to take one thing away from our discussion today, what would you want that one thing to be?
[00:14:21] Mac Boyter: The one thing would be that autonomous coding is here to stay. I think to your earlier point, which was very well said – AI and the models of it may vary, and I liked that. I like to see the competition of different firms that are all attacking us from different angles, because ultimately that breeds innovation in my humble opinion.
[00:14:42] AI is here to stay. Autonomous coding is here to stay. I think it’s only accelerating under what’s been happening in the last couple of years with a global pandemic, regulatory changes, the government, and frankly, investment capital is pouring into the area. People are putting money behind these things, which again, helps to drive innovation.
[00:15:01] It’s here to stay. It’s something providers should pay attention to if they haven’t already looked for it. You need to be aware of what’s coming down the pipe because it’s going to be here sooner than we think.
[00:15:13] Colin Hung: Mac, thank you so much for the information you’ve sharing and for anyone listening and watching, we’ll put the link to the report itself into the show notes, so you don’t have to say it. Mac, before you go, where can people go to find out more information about KLAS?
[00:15:26] Mac Boyter: I’m glad you asked. For providers who share information with KLAS, they get access to our data as a thank you. Because we are mission-driven as I mentioned. So by going on the KLAS website, they’ll be able to actually access and download what we call a spotlight Report that is focused on this one solution.
[00:15:44] And in the future, we’ll have more data. So more things to come.
[00:15:48] Colin Hung: And what is that KLAS website?
[00:15:50] Mac Boyter: Yes, it’s just KLASresearch.com
[00:15:52] Colin Hung: That’s KLAS with a K
[00:15:54] Mac Boyter: With a K. Yes.
[00:15:57] Colin Hung: Thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and all the information you shared with us today.
[00:16:02] Mac Boyter: Thank you so much.
