Abstraction

If you are responsible for Clinical Quality Reporting or Improvement, then you know that each measure and each program has different exacting requirements and submission deadlines for your organization. Making sure that qualified abstractors for each type of required measurement are scheduled and prioritized to get your submissions done accurately and on time is a constant challenge that cannot be ignored or delayed. 

Accurate and timely submission of clinical quality data for your organization is a constant challenge. For many, the constant requirement to schedule the correct staff to complete abstractions, review abstractions to ensure quality, submit abstractions by deadline and overall management of the process diverts time away from implementing and making progress with clinical quality improvement initiatives.

We work with our clients to establish customized abstraction programs to meet the ongoing challenge of accurate completion, review and timely submission of quality data for your organization.

PTM Services provides a wide range of abstraction services and programs that guarantee 95% accuracy and support your on time submission. We work with our clients to establish customized abstraction programs to meet the ongoing challenge of accurate and timely submission of quality data for your organization.

Practical Approach based on Experience.

Our experience has taught us the variables involved in each project and how to manage them. In addition to an extraordinary wide variety of clinical measures, the requirements of each program for which measures being submitted, the technical clinical landscape of the organization and the specific implementation of each EMR plays an important role in the effort.

Each project has a Program Manager assigned who is your day-to-day contact, responsible for the team, the quality review, and the variables that make each project unique. Also, each team has direct access to our Clinical Lead Physician(s) to work out organizational specific factors that may impact the abstraction process, documentation and interpretation.

Our emphasis is on quality, not speed.

Many abstraction firms compensate abstractors primarily by the number completed abstractions. Our experience is that this has a tendency to reward speed over quality. PTM Services abstractors are paid by the hour and the quality of the deliverable consistently evaluated throughout the project from beginning to end. The result is a higher quality abstraction and less rework when deadlines loom.

Experienced, Trained and Tested.

Each of our abstractors is an experienced clinical health professional. Each is trained and tested for each specific measure.

Active Inter-rater Reliability from start-to-finish.

Our program managers perform Inter-rated Reliability to ensure a minimum of 95% accuracy. After each abstractor is trained and tested, no matter how experienced, they must perform the “first five” abstractions in your environment with your systems and variables. ONLY after scoring 100% on the sample are they allowed to proceed. Anything less, means retraining, correction and another five abstractions. Once cleared and fully active, their work is continuously reviewed per the inter-rater reliability frame work all the way to the submission.

Inter-rater reliability (IRR) is the process by which we determine how reliable a Core Measures or Registry abstractor’s data entry is. It is a score of how much consensus exists in ratings and the level of agreement among raters, observers, coders, or examiners. By re abstracting a sample of the same charts to determine accuracy, we can project that information to the total cases abstracted and thus gauge the abstractor’s knowledge of the specifications.

Inter-Rater Reliability: What It Is, How to Do It, and Why Your Hospital’s Bottom Line Is at Risk Without It (americandatanetwork.com)