NEW YORK – Beth Israel Medical Center, part of Boston-based Continuum Health Partners, is using physician query software to improve clinical documentation.

Hospital officials say the software, from New York-based Meta Health Technology, is already generating a return on investment.

"The new Meta software is eliminating our need for a manual physician query tracking process and is helping to ensure that we get the necessary documentation from our physicians," said Ray Cosner, director of health information management at Beth Israel.  "Until now, we didn't have a mechanism to ensure that the addendum a physician agreed to provide was actually added to the patient chart,"

 "Going into our pilot program with the software, we expected to see benefits in terms of documentation quality, coding quality, reducing the amount of revenue the hospital might be losing, opening the lines of communication between the HIM (health information management) Department and physicians and, finally, being able to generate reports that help us monitor the entire physician query process. After only two months, we are already getting a substantial return on our investment in the software, " he said.

Meta's Electronic Physician Query  will close the loop between the coder or CDI (clinical documentation improvement) specialist and the physician and automate and expedite the physician query process.

It also gives hospital managers tools to manage and measure the effectiveness of the process, while allowing staff to generate a query and obtain a response from the doctor. Where appropriate, the physician can provide documentation to substantiate a specific diagnosis that should be included in the patient's abstract and billing claim.

"Beth Israel has been a client of Meta's since 1981 and has partnered with us in many successful implementations" says Eli Nahmias, president and CEO of Meta. "We are pleased that they recognize the value of this new product.