Noninterruptive tool to support provider malnutrition documentation and minimize documentation queries

Objectives: Determine if an electronic documentation tool can reduce documentation queries for malnutrition without impacting diagnostic coding. Materials and Methods: Malnutrition documentation queries and diagnosis coding proportions were compared between 2 groups of 600 malnourished adults discharged from internal medicine services before and after this electronic malnutrition documentation tool was promoted. Results: Documentation queries for malnutrition were observed in 300 (50%) of the preintervention discharges and 112 (19%) of the postintervention discharges (P<.001). A diagnosis code for malnutrition was observed in 99% of both groups. In a logistic regression accounting for clustering by provider, the odds ratio of a query postdeployment vs predeployment was 0.21 (95% CI, 0.16-0.29). In 88 of 112 (79%) of the postintervention discharges queried for malnutrition, the tool was not used as recommended. Conclusions: We have demonstrated that introducing and promoting this electronic documentation tool can reduce querying for malnutrition while preserving diagnostic coding.