Defining encounters

In Axiom, you can define and gather encounters together to easily analyze episodes of care and returns so that your organization can address a wide variety of business questions or challenges. This allows you to look at a problem and identify the affected population. For example, you may want to evaluate the causes behind readmissions or find out what hip replacement patients are still experiencing joint pain more than three months after surgery.

By defining episodes and return population definitions in Axiom, you can gain insight across facilities, years, and patient care settings that are linked by a common ID with the flexibility to look at visits (and all of the associated visit data) for visits occurring before and after the index, anchor, or admission.

About episodes and returns

An episode is a series of medical encounters that address a specific medical condition or center around a specific set of medical services. Episodes have been used by organizations for some time, but until recently, they were of interest from a clinical or quality perspective. Episodes are now becoming more popular due to the potential of being a source of reimbursement.

Episodes are similar to and often synonymous with bundles, which is the process of bundling a set of services and paying one amount to allocate across providers. A bundled payment methodology involves combining the payments for a physician, hospital, and other health care provider services into a single bundled payment amount. This amount is calculated based on the expected costs of all items and services furnished to a beneficiary during an episode of care. Payment models that provide a single bundled payment to healthcare providers can motivate them to furnish services efficiently, to better coordinate care, and to improve the quality of care. Healthcare providers receiving a bundled payment may either realize a gain or loss, based on how successfully they manage resources and total costs throughout each episode of care. A bundled payment also creates an incentive for providers and suppliers to coordinate and deliver care more efficiently because a single bundled payment will often cover services furnished by various health care providers in multiple care delivery settings.

By defining an episode, you create or select a data filter, which narrows the scope of the Encounter table to match events to the criteria, called the anchor. After further configuration of an optional pre-anchor and post-anchor, you can process the definition, which generates records in the database for reporting purposes.

A return is an episode when a patient who visited a clinic or doctor's office, or was admitted to a hospital and then discharged, returns again after some time for the same reasons.

About encounter measure definitions

From the Encounter measures page, you can manage and process episode and return definitions. From this table, you can:

  • View a list of all folders and definitions

  • View the active status of definitions

  • Add, edit, delete, or move folders

  • Add, edit, delete, copy, or move definitions

  • Process definitions

The Library side panel displays a hierarchical view of the folders. From this panel, you can easily navigate across the folders. To access the folder's content, click its name. The folder will open in a table format.

To search for a definition, you can use the search box in the upper right corner of the page. To filter the results in the table, click the ellipsis(...) in any of the available headings. To add a definition or folder, click + Add in the upper right corner of the page.

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