Messages from the Vice Chairs of Safety, Quality, & Operations

Message from the Vice Chair of Inpatient Safety, Quality & Operations

Welcome to the new academic year!

The new bed tower, Plaza West Tower, is slated to open in October 2025. This will be a state-of-the art facility for heart and vascular patients. Please contact Thomas Ciesielski (t.ciesielski@wustl.edu) if you are interested in touring the new bed tower for your clinical service.

To review your inpatient billing data and discuss documentation opportunities, there will be documentation and office hours offered each month throughout the year. You may sign up for times in August or September via the links below if interested. Sign-ups for future months will be available in later announcements.

As always, we encourage all faculty, fellows, residents, and staff to report safety events through ERS (ers.wustm.wustl.edu). Additionally, please report near misses, and other potentially unsafe conditions. We learn from these events and make improvements to the system. A good rule of thumb is, if it bothers you, report it. This year, we will be leading a department wide Morbidity and Mortality Conference. All in the department are welcome to attend. The first will be on October 2, 2025 from 12-1 PM in Wohl Auditorium. Please sign up via the link below to receive a calendar invite.

Message from the Vice Chair of Ambulatory Clinical Operations, Safety & Quality

Updates:

1. E-consults, which are used to ask a focused clinical question of a specialist regarding a particular outpatient, is now available for Allergy and Immunology and for Dermatology. This type of consult is distinct from a referral. By ordering an Econsult in Epic (type in “Econsult Dermatology” for example), your question will be routed to a provider who will review the patient’s chart and respond to your question. If you need to have your patient seen by the specialist, you would order a referral (type in “Refer Dermatology”) instead. Econsults can speed up turn around time in situations where a physical visit is not necessary to provide an answer.
2. Access time for new patient appointments in the DOM has improved due to increased focus on optimizing usage of the appointments we have. Thank you to all of you for the efforts in this regard.
3. We are working on providing education to ambulatory providers on optimal billing strategies to ensure that they are getting appropriate credit for the hard work that they are doing.  We will be performing outreach to each division, but if you have questions or would like help meanwhile, please contact me (mjerath@wustl.edu).
4. The DOM is conducting edits for HCC coding once again. As a reminder, HCC coding allows for appropriate risk adjustment for our patients and directly affects payment. If you Manage, Evaluate, Assess, or Treat an HCC condition during a visit, please enter the diagnosis as a visit diagnosis and mention what you did for the condition in your Assessment and Plan. As an example, if I consider a patient’s diabetic condition when treating their asthma and if I am able to document this, I can include diabetes (an HCC condition) in my visit diagnosis. This will impact the HCC score for the patient and help all reimbursement to our system for that patient’s care through the whole year.