Three questions with Garri Garrison: Health care villains and heroes

March 7, 2022 / By Garri Garrison, Kelli Christman

I sat down with the 3M Health Information Systems Division President Garri Garrison to talk about our unique history and how it’s informing the future of health care.

3M HIS is debuting a new theme for HIMSS this year: We wrote the book. Can you tell us about the theme and what it means for 3M HIS clients?

3M HIS is embarking on our 39^th year of supporting the health care industry with products and solutions to advance and improve the health care revenue cycle. In almost four decades, we have built and grown a longstanding relationship with the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) as well as ministries of health in more than 20 countries. Our unique expertise and background supporting financial, quality and compliance initiatives helped to define our industry. Our strong client relationships, and their proven outcomes, provide a strong plot for our next chapter.

Our next chapter breathes new life into characters that have been in our books for more than a decade: artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous coding. Our clients can choose their own adventure and timeline to defeat industry challenges (compliance and COVID-19, we’re looking at you) and ensure accurate coding and documentation. There are no villains in these chapters, only competition to drive us, and our industry, to be more creative and innovative.

How is 3M HIS incorporating our unique AI and ambient intelligence to reduce physician burnout and ensure accurate coding and reimbursement?

Maybe “no villain” wasn’t totally accurate. The villain remains administrative burdens on physicians. Accurate code capture and documentation is the hero. Our clients have seen the value in our technology as it reduces the time required to code, reduces the administrative and documentation burdens on physicians, while at the same time allowing them to focus on the patient. We marry our unique workflow knowledge and expertise with AI in so many of our products.

As we continue to develop and launch top innovative AI and deep learning models, our clients experience cost reductions with both autonomous coding focused on areas that are low hanging fruit – radiology, ED and same day surgery and automating clinical documentation integrity (CDI) and physician engagement efforts. Take, for example, our new approach to CDI being released this year: An expert driven, cloud-based prioritization solution, rooted in AI, that delivers a compelling ROI in some of the most complex health care delivery networks.

3M™ M*Modal CDI Engage One provides real time understanding of clinical documentation along with evidence from the entire encounter to nudge the physician for documentation optimization in their normal workflow. This same information is surfaced to the CDI specialist via evidence sheets as a part of their workflow to ensure that documentation opportunities don’t fall through the cracks.

In addition, this year we’ll release our new intelligent analytics platform that will provide insights into the mid revenue cycle’s problem areas. The technology will help leaders track and monitor progress, and to identify areas of their business that need focused improvements. 

What we have learned from our years of developing technologies and using leading AI models is that health care information is the most complex data in the world. You must have a complete library of technology, expertise, rules and edits to automate at scale. 3M does, and we incorporate it all within our autonomous solutions. 

Turing the page, what else can our clients and HIMSS attendees expect to see at our booth this year?

You definitely don’t want to miss Intermountain Healthcare take the stage at HIMSS to tell their AI journey with us. Their team will talk about our partnership and how they used AI to develop a physician-forward CDI strategy to improve the organization’s quality metrics.

I hope that you’ll all stop by our booth to grab a cup of coffee, see how we wrote the book and get a sneak peek at the next chapter.

Garri Garrison is division president for 3M Health Information Systems.

Kelli Christman is senior marketing communications and strategic communications specialist at 3M Health Information Systems.

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