J.A. Thomas Media Center - Press - Fast Facts

Fast Facts

Founded: 1991

Overview:

Founded in 1991, J. A. Thomas & Associates, Inc. is the nationally recognized leader in healthcare compliance and documentation improvement. The company's innovative Compliant Documentation Management Program® has helped more than 500 hospitals and 30,000 physicians nationwide improve CMI by an average of 5% - 10%. Healthcare professionals with clinical and business insights from doctors, nurses, coders, and administrators founded the company. The result is a company and a proven program that blends clinical expertise with compliance to ensure the accuracy of clinical documentation reflecting the appropriate severity.

Executive Management:

Judith A. Thomas, RN, CAC
Founder

Joanne Webb, MNNC
Chief Executive Officer
Partner

Gary Hullquist, MD
Vice President
Partner

Don Leeper
Vice President Technology
Partner

Mel Tully, MSN
Senior Vice President Clinical Services and Education

Paul Weygandt, MD, JD, MPH, MBA, CPE
Vice President Physician Services

Corporate Structure:

A privately held corporation, J. A. Thomas & Associates, Inc. has experienced continuous growth, which has been entirely financed by earnings with no outside venture capital.

Founding Principles:

Improve Documentation

Unlike retrospective coding-based programs, CDMP® gives doctors and nurses education, strategies, and tools that allow them to accurately and compliantly document the severity and complexity of each case concurrently. Doctors are motivated because more accurate reflection of patient diagnosis results in improvement to risk adjusted statistics and they have complete clinical supervision over all documentation. Nurses are motivated because as they achieve documentation improvement with physicians, they can play a key role in improving communication

Improve CMI

CDMP® gives clients a concurrent, clinical process that ensures compliant key phrases, complexity, and multiple levels of severity are captured to best reflect a facility's true, accurate CMI. CDMP® also helps proactively manage many of the challenges all hospitals face in administering CMI, including:

  • October 1 revisions
  • New/changing service lines
  • Coding
  • Physician documentation

After more than 500 hospital implementations, CDMP® has delivered an average of 5 - 10% improvement to CMI.

Ensure Compliance

With CDMP®, hospital clients have the education and technological resources to employ more than 450 unique documentation strategies backed by The Coding Clinic and ICD-9-CM Official Guidelines. That means that every record contains the key compliant phrases necessary to support appropriate reimbursement for resources consumed and avoid the loss and risk associated with non-compliance.

Improve Comparative Reports

More and more consumers and insurance payors are reviewing ratings to help make important healthcare decisions -rating can directly affect a hospital's line. The CDMPQuality® is a program that alerts hospitals to capture core measures or documentation to support variance from core quality measures in real time.

CDMPQuality® helps hospital clients:

  • Concurrently identify cases subject to quality measures
  • Concurrently improve capture of core measures
  • Improve real-time knowledge of quality outcomes
  • Compile data more effectively and efficiently
  • Use public reporting to enhance competitive positioning and build market share

CDMPQuality®'s overall goal is to ensure the documentation

Maximize Appropriate Reimbursement

The more complex and severe diagnoses hospitals manage with appropriate documentation, the higher their CMI. The higher their CMI, the better their reimbursement. Because the company's CDMP® does a better job of reflecting your true and accurate CMI, hospitals qualify for more appropriate reimbursement.

Key Product Offering

Compliant Document Management Program®

CDMP® is an innovative, intuitive and collaborative way of capturing complete clinical data that accurately reflects severity and complexity in each patient's record while the patient is in the hospital and adhering to all compliance and coding regulations.

The goal of CDMP® is to achieve accurate Case Mix Index and appropriate reimbursement for the hospitals actually provide.

The result: an average increase in CMI by 5 - 10% for over 500 hospitals since 1991 as understated severity is corrected through complete and compliant clinical documentation.

CDMP® is supported by a proprietary software solution and is delivered through professional peer-to-peer education process, which ensures understanding and buy-in for everyone on a hospital's clinical team.