Emergency Physicians Professional Association (EPPA)

Background

The Emergency Physicians Professional Association (EPPA) is a physician group that serves multiple hospital emergency departments across Minnesota. With several health systems in its network, EPPA has long been dedicated to improving quality of care, operational efficiency, and physician performance through better access to clinical data. All of its sites use Epic’s EHR system, which provides some enhanced reporting tools, but consistent, actionable data analysis was out of reach until EPPA joined forces with d2i.

Challenges

Before partnering with d2i, EPPA struggled with fragmented and inconsistent access to clinical data. While each hospital’s medical director might have had access to internal dashboards, there was no uniform data infrastructure across the system. The result was a siloed view of performance and a limited ability to make systemwide decisions. According to EPPA’s Medical Director of Quality, Dr. Peter Currie:

Medical Director A had access to this set of data and Medical Director B had access to a different set of data. So having some sort of consistent data across all of our sites was something that we didn’t really have prior to working with d2i.

The data EPPA could access in-house was largely limited to billing information. Productivity metrics — such as patients per hour or RVUs — were available, but broader clinical insights were difficult to extract from the EHR. And with increasing regulatory requirements, such as MIPS reporting, the lack of structured, reliable clinical data became an important concern.

Solution: Emergency Medicine Performance Analytics and Custom MIPS Reporting

EPPA turned to d2i to solve these issues because of d2i’s focus on emergency medicine, its clinical expertise, and its ability to customize solutions to each client’s needs.

One of the partnership’s first major wins was providing access to operationally meaningful reports, such as shift-level productivity metrics. Rather than assessing provider performance alone, EPPA could now evaluate the productivity of individual shifts regardless of who was working them, an essential tool for medical directors making staffing decisions.

With its Emergency Medicine Performance Analytics, d2i also helped EPPA deliver on its vision of a more balanced scorecard approach to clinician performance. Beyond just RVUs, they now had access to integrated metrics for throughput, billing and coding, and clinical care.

But the collaboration’s most transformative solution came in the form of custom MIPS reporting. d2i collaborated with EPPA to develop methods for capturing and reporting on complex quality measures, especially those involving clinical decision-making narratives that don’t reside in structured data fields. Currie said:

d2i was able to provide us with more robust clinical data around things like resource utilization, antibiotic and opiate prescribing, and imaging utilization, as well as that next level of complexity that answers, ‘Are you providing appropriate care to a patient?’

By working with d2i to template specific medical decision-making (MDM) language into clinician documentation, EPPA was able to extract data that would otherwise be invisible to standard analytics tools. Currie said:

The ability to template that decision-making and have d2i turn it into a binary answer for MIPS reporting has been a game-changer in terms of tackling the more complicated MIPS quality measures.

Results: From Chief Complaint to Quality in Management

Since implementing d2i, EPPA has seen a marked improvement in both its operational and quality reporting capabilities.

• Improved staffing decisions: Medical directors now rely on shift-based productivity reports to staff departments more effectively.
• Balanced performance insights: Providers receive detailed, data-rich feedback that goes beyond basic productivity metrics.
• Game-changing MIPS reporting: d2i’s support in custom documentation and data extraction allows EPPA to accurately report on complex quality measures involving antibiotics, opioids, imaging, and resource utilization.

Beyond the technology, Currie also highlighted d2i’s deep clinical expertise and responsiveness as a key reason for the partnership’s success.

d2i. Better data. Better healthcare.

Join leading emergency medicine groups like EPPA who are using d2i to drive clinical excellence and improve provider performance. Contact us to learn how d2i can support your team.