Primary Health Care Corporation (PHCC) in partnership with American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA), has launched a custom-made Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) training programme for its physicians.
Clinical documentation will be soon available to patients through an on-line patient portal. CDI has a direct impact on patient care by providing information to all members of the care team, as well as those downstream who may be treating the patient at a further stage.
The main objectives behind this programme are to ensure patients’ safety, continuity of care and quality electronic referrals to HMC and Sidra Medical and Research Center.
“We are delighted to partner with AHIMA in the Clinical Documentation Improvement Training Programme for PHCC physicians and believe that considering CDI as a key element of PHCC strategy will improve all aspects of our operations,” said Dr Taha Abdulhameed, lead subject matter expert physician at PHCC.
“By ensuring and facilitating the accuracy of reporting of diagnoses and procedures, Clinical Documentation Improvement will help PHCC be compliant with quality measures. Furthermore, when put as a priority for PHCC physicians, it will result in greater co-operation between different clinical teams and improve patient outcomes”, Dr Taha added.
PHCC is ensuring successful integration of clinical documentation with an electronic medical record by engaging 75 of its clinical staff, mainly physicians, into this training programme. Physicians that will then transfer the knowledge to their colleagues to improve their clinical documentation.
“AHIMA World Congress is supporting PHCC to help create a CDI programme and start staff on the path to professional staff certification in CDI. This initiative is pioneered in Qatar to create a case for both - effective organisational improvement and workforce development for entire Primary Healthcare system in Qatar, ” said Alexandre Bouché, global managing director of AHIMA.
“Clinical Documentation Improvement Training will ensure safer and higher quality care, integrity of data, more complete and specific clinical coding, which enables more accurate physician and healthcare institution profiling, more accurate reflection of severity of illness, ” he added.
Following the full implementation of Cerner Clinical Information System across all 23 PHCC, which went live in July 2016, the electronic Medical Record (EMR) has been successfully utilised by all PHCC clinicians to document patient care visits that reach almost 10,000 a day. The EMR system, which includes radiology images, is fully shared with HMC; this facilitates communication between physicians managing patient care in a time-efficient manner.
To ensure the continuity of the health information technology success, PHCC is now directing its efforts onto quality clinical documentation to improve patient care and safety.
PHCC physicians and AHIMA officials who took part in the training programme.
