Safe patient handling and mobility claims coding: a pragmatic and functional approach

Healthcare organizations are now engaged in Delivery System Transformation (DST), whereby performance-based incentive payment programs are used to support and reward hospitals for investing in projects that advance care and population health while lowering costs. In these efforts, it becomes critical to understand causes of patient handling and mobility workers compensation injury claims. Until now, programs that are self-administered or utilize a third party administrator (TPA) have differing, if any, codes to determine employee injury trends. Unfortunately, these coding structures, particularly when it comes to causes, lack any real, actionable data to establish investment needs for safe patient handling interventions. Healthcare organizations are left to drill down to the accident-description level and extract key causes of the patient handling injury, a time-consuming and unrealistic option given the human resources demand within healthcare. 

This paper proposes a condensed, yet powerful, sub-level coding structure for safe patient handling claims that any claims reporting system can easily adopt. As a result, this coding structure will eliminate the need to manually sort through lines and lines of data for relevant trends. Adopting this proposed coding structure nationally will reward the safe patient handling community with a consistent and transparent approach to claims. As a result, it will enable facility-level comparison of key functions and tasks associated with patient handling claims, peer-to-peer benchmarking of these causes and return on investment calculations at the fingertips of the end user.

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