Shore-up risk and severity through mortality reviews

A patient comes into the hospital, so sick that there’s likely no coming back. The physicians do everything they can, but the patient expires. Anyone working in a hospital setting knows this scenario all too well.

But, look more closely at the documentation for that patient. In many cases, the physicians are so busy trying to save a life that the documentation simply gets neglected; it ends up painting a picture that implies the patient died unexpectedly after coming to the hospital with a relatively low-severity condition. Essentially, the documentation as it stands describes a situation where a healthy patient died under the watch of the medical team.

This does not look good for the physicians or the facility.