Tip: Manage and track physician advisors’ time to balance competing priorities

Physician advisors serve a variety of purposes beyond documentation improvement, including assisting case management, utilization review, quality, and coding departments, among other assignments, according to a recent benchmarking report and survey from ACDIS.

“The problem you run into is that the physician advisor role gets co-opted,” says Anthony F. Oliva, DO, MMM, FACPE, Vice President and Chief Medical Officer at JA Thomas/Nuance Communications, Inc., based in Burlington, Massachusetts.

As the physician advisor for a 15-hospital system, Erica E. Remer, MD, FACEP, CCDS, clinical documentation integrity advisor of University Hospitals in Cleveland, knows how difficult it can be to manage competing obligations.

“I work full-time in my system, and still it can feel overwhelming,” Remer says. “How can you accomplish everything and help your CDI program move forward if you have all these competing obligations?”

While CDI programs need to be flexible, keeping in mind the limited availability of the physician advisor, parameters should be set regarding how much of the advisor’s five to 10 hours per week should be spent on which tasks, says Louis Grujanac, DO, AHIMA ICD-10-CM/PCS trainer, an independent consultant based in the Chicago area.

“There’s five minutes here and five minutes there, and before you know it that physician advisor’s time is spent up and the CDI program has no additional room for larger education efforts, assessments, or growth analysis,” he says.

Tracking the physician advisor’s time should fall to the CDI program administrator or manager; the time tracking should weigh the advisor’s efforts against the larger needs of the program and ensure that individual physicians or CDI specialists aren’t monopolizing the advisor’s time with minutiae as opposed to bigger-picture educational or program improvement activities.