Modeling variance in patient outcomes using medical claims and other forms of aggregated administrative data may ignore significant contributions associated with providers who are not recorded in billing transactions. We examined the association between interdisciplinary provider factors and length of stay (LOS) for 1,099 lumbar spine surgery patients. Interdisciplinary provider “dose” (number of providers/case), “workload” (care of other patients), and “activity” factors were defined and generated. Hierarchical Regression models were used to test the impact of these provider factors controlling for the effect of socio-demographic and clinical factors. Interdisciplinary provider factors explained 12% of additional variance in LOS. EHR-based interdisciplinary care team representations hold promise in contributing to our understanding of health care delivery and quality.

Keywords: interdisciplinary care, nursing documentation, workload, length of stay, electronic health records (EHR)

Learning Objective: Understand how electronic health record data can be used to represent interdisciplinary provider contribution to care and use such data to model the impact of provider workload, activity on patient, and number of providers involved in care on patient outcomes.

Understand the feasibility of combining electronic health record data, health system employee databases, and public provider information systems to define new measures to capture variation in interdisciplinary provider contribution to care.

Authors:

Dammika Walpitage (Presenter)
University of Kansas Medical Center

Amy Garcia, University of Kansas Medical Center
Ellen Harper, University of Kansas Medical Center
Neena Sharma, University of Kansas Medical Center
Lemuel Waitman, University of Kansas Medical Center

Presentation Materials:

• Abstract/Manuscript - 1