Posted on July 10, 2025

Strengthening CV Outcomes with Merged Clinical & Coding Data – from Registry Submission to Revenue Capture

A doctor typing on a laptop, focused on their work in a clinical setting.

Reliable clinical registry data management is at the heart of any cardiovascular program. While collecting data through abstraction and reports and integrating it with coding can feel like a well-oiled machine, many leading cardiovascular programs are unaware of a gap that could be costing them six-figure revenue.

The gap? Clinical registry data and coding teams often speak different languages.

hbRecon: Opening the Door for More Accurate CV Coding

hbRecon, a complement to hbCOR, bridges that gap. It translates clinical data into a specific and actionable coding format to identify a DRG code that more accurately captures the nature of the care provided.

Here’s how hbRecon integrates into your existing heartbase workflow:

  1. Data integration. hbRecon integrates data in its custom platform to create a unified dataset. This includes integrating clinical data with hospital coding and financial information to accurately reflect the care provided.
  2. Report generation and review. heartbase provides feedback and insight on a weekly basis and presents a wide array of reports, from DRG Summary Reports to ICD-10 Procedure & Diagnoses Detail Reports.
  3. Reconciliation and process review. This step gives the clinical team a chance to review the cases and submit them for secondary review by the hospital coding and compliance teams, if needed. This process varies site-by-site, but its four primary objectives are:
    1. Reviewing documentation and coding
    2. Re-coding and re-billing as indicated
    3. Identifying outliers with complex coding
    4. Reabstracting clinical data, as necessary

Following this integration, your clinical data will “speak the same language” as your coding team to capture revenue more accurately than ever before. The implications for your CV program’s bottom line can’t be understated.

hbCOR: A Solid Foundation for CV Data Collection

Of course, a strong clinical registry data management system starts with a solid foundation. hbRecon is most effective when paired with hbCOR’s ability to unify clinical data from every major CV registry. Using a single comprehensive repository, clinical teams can easily access a complete picture of a patient’s cardiovascular history.

With hbCOR, the following CV Registries are all in one convenient location:

  • The American College of Cardiology NCDR (ACC-NCDR)
  • The Society of Thoracic Surgeons Database (STS)
  • The American Heart Association Get With The Guidelines (AHA GWTG)
  • Extracorporeal Life Support Organization (ELSO-ECMO)
  • State Registries (CCORP, COAP, IHA, and more)
  • Custom Registries

Additional benefits include:

  • Simplified data collection: Reduce the burden of manual data collection with hbCOR’s advanced interoperability.
  • Real-time data validation: Leverage immediate pre-harvest data validation for completeness, accuracy, and compliance.
  • On-Demand Reports & Scorecards: Access the following reports and scorecards.
    • Ad Hoc Queries
    • MD Scorecards
    • Complications & Outcomes Reporting
    • Equipment Analysis
    • AUC & Risk Scoring
    • and more!

With the partnership between hbRecon and hbCOR in place, many leading CV programs turn data into actionable insights that boost financial performance, including improvements in the Case Mix Index (CMI).

Improved Financial Outcomes from CV Data Collection

While hbCOR and hbRecon can be employed independently, this iterative work between the two platforms – available in one seamless heartbase workflow – can have a profound impact on your cardiovascular program’s bottom line. By facilitating more accurate data transfer between clinical registry and coding, the addition of hbRecon helps CV programs with:

Reduction in overbilling and underbilling: hbRecon runs real-time data analysis to identify and rectify coding discrepancies. That leads to more precise DRG assignments that reduce over- and under-billing.
Improved reimbursement rates: Integrating clinical registry data and coding with hbRecon results in more accurately reflected episodes of care. The result is reimbursements that are commensurate with the care provided, which isn’t always a given.
Consistent performance improvement: Clinical registry data-based audits deliver actionable insights that build momentum for cross-departmental initiatives focused on addressing specific challenges, ultimately leading to efficiencies that save costs.

See hbRecon in action and discover how it captures six-figure revenue.

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You’ve already built the foundation for better CV data management with hbCOR. Schedule a demo to discover how integrating hbRecon can make your data more accurate and actionable to transform your CV program’s revenue capture.

Posted on February 20, 2025

It’s All About Collaboration: The Transformative Power of Clinical Registry Data-Based Audits

In cardiovascular (CV) services, and today’s healthcare landscape as a whole, achieving seamless collaboration across departments is a necessity. Unfortunately, many healthcare organizations struggle with structural & data silos, inconsistent communication, and disjointed processes – this heavily impacts their ability to streamline coding data. Outsourcing coding audits to a trusted partner not only provides a powerful solution to these challenges, but it facilitates compliance, higher quality healthcare, and invaluable interdepartmental collaboration. 

Before an Audit: The Challenges

Inconsistencies Impede Ability to Hit Quality Benchmarks

Quality clinical registry benchmarks provide CV services with a method to compare performance to other similar providers and identify areas of improvement. By obtaining consistent & accurate coding data, healthcare organizations can ensure alignment between these two datasets and reduce reporting errors from systems that rely on coding data. This, in turn, leads to more informed changes rooted in evidence-based care. Unfortunately, without a clinical registry data-based audit performed in partnership with a trusted CV data partner, many organizations face significant roadblocks that stand in the way of collaboration and quality improvement efforts, such as:

  • Data Silos: Tracking data in silos across teams leads to inconsistencies in data reporting and makes it challenging to gain a unified view of patient outcomes and system-wide performance.
  • Inconsistent Quality Metrics: Inconsistent metric tracking across various departments can lead to confusion and misaligned priorities, hampering the ability to identify and address system-wide CV trends that need intervention.
  • Fragmented Communication: While a coder who has worked with the same provider for many years may understand shorthand or abbreviations, confusing notes and ineligible provider handwriting can still make it difficult for coders to decipher a provider’s EMR notes. Because many coders likely find it uncomfortable to approach a busy provider to ask for clarification on a specific note, coders may try to guess what the provider meant. Unfortunately, that usually results in more work long term. A clinical documentation improvement (CDI) process, or program, may help minimize these errors by checking coding data for an accurate reflection of the patient’s condition. By engaging in this exercise, practices proactively address any mistakes that may stand in the way of proper reimbursement. 
  • Missed Opportunities for Improvement: Healthcare organizations rely on coding data to inform performance improvement and maintain quality benchmarks. In the absence of robust clinical registry-driven data analysis and reporting, it’s more challenging to make informed decisions about improving care processes, which can negatively impact patient outcomes and financial performance.
  • Coder Turnover: Coders not only experience a steep learning curve, but they must keep up with constantly evolving payer requirements. High turnover in the field only makes it more difficult for departments to keep up with these changes and avoid denials. Furthermore, there are 11,000 CPT codes for coders to learn, 225 new codes added in 2023, 75 deleted, and 93 revised. In fact, anesthesia represented the only section of the coding guidelines the American Medical Association didn’t change that year.1 

After an Audit: The Benefits

Data-Driven Decision-Making Leads to Actionable Insights

Organizations that introduce clinical registry data-based audits with hbRecon experience more clarity, structure, and accountability – primarily driven by our tool’s intense focus on interdepartmental collaboration. In fact, after an audit using hbRecon’s three-phased approach rooted in integration, investigation, and reconciliation, many CV practices experience the following advantages:   

  • Reliable, Centralized Data: One of the most valuable outputs of an audit with hbRecon is the consolidation of data from disparate systems into one single platform. This allows all departments to access consistent information, eliminates discrepancies, and enables unified decision-making.
  • Crystal Clear Accountability and Transparency: The hbRecon audit involves developing standardized metrics that support comprehensive reporting. This enables departments to clearly see how their contributions impact overall outcomes and builds a sense of shared responsibility.
  • Matching Goals and Priorities: Rather than making sense of disparate goals and priorities, the audit process brings departments together to establish common quality benchmarks and objectives that set everyone on the same path toward the same goals.
  • Uplevel Communication Channels: hbRecon fosters cross-departmental communication between clinical and coding teams, fostering a more collaborative environment built in proactive and effective dialogue that is open and constructive so issues can be addressed before they escalate. 
  • Consistent Quality Improvement: Clinical registry data-based audits deliver actionable insights that build momentum for cross-departmental initiatives focused on addressing specific challenges.
  • Seamless Collaboration: By weaving clinical registry data-based audits into the fabric of organizations, departments learn to trust one another and work together seamlessly, creating lasting partnerships that extend beyond the scope of the audit.

While clinical registry data-based audits provide outsized benefits in terms of compliance, they are also catalysts for cross-departmental collaboration and long-term improvement. In today’s complex healthcare environment, a trusted CV data partner can be the difference between hitting quality benchmarks or falling short. 

Given the collaborative nature of our clinical registry data-based audits, we inherently help CV teams build transparency, alignment, and communication around coding data. But the results of these types of audits don’t stop at hitting quality benchmarks – they produce a culture that benefits patients and your bottom line.

It’s all about collaboration. 

References:

  1. HFMA. Common coding challenges hospitals face and how to fix them. HFMA. Published August 7, 2023. https://www.hfma.org/revenue-cycle/coding/common-coding-challenges-hospitals-face-and-how-to-fix-them/

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