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

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.

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.

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.

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.