Catholic Health builds momentum for CDI excellence with early ROI success

By: Solventum

Catholic Health

Catholic Health Long Island has been caring for Long Islanders for over 100 years, delivering exceptional clinical care. The organization is committed to becoming the premier health system on Long Island, transforming healthcare delivery through state-of-the-art, patient-centered care for every person, every time. The organization’s focus on innovative problem-solving enabled it to fully leverage Solventum’s solutions and tools, further enhancing its capabilities. This partnership’s success is a testament to the faith, compassion and innovation already embedded in Catholic Health’s approach to care.

Challenges facing Catholic Health

Catholic Health faced barriers to achieving a high-performing clinical documentation integrity (CDI) program, including operational gaps and workflow inefficiencies. If a case was reviewed by CDI, coders were required to send the case back to CDI for final review and bill drop, which contributed to high discharged-not-final-billed (DNFB) rates and missed opportunities for collaboration with coders and education to make final decisions regarding final codes.

Coders also had no access to CDI findings, creating silos and inefficiencies. Their legacy encoder lacked key functions like auto-sequencing, patient safety indicator (PSI) and hospital-acquired complication (HAC) flagging and relied heavily on human memory and manual processes.

These challenges had downstream impacts. Severity of illness (SOI) and risk of mortality (ROM) metrics were underutilized, limiting Catholic Health’s ability to capture the complexity of its patient population. At the same time, provider engagement was inconsistent, leading to documentation gaps that weakened quality scores and reimbursement.