Unlocking CDI's future: From SOAP Notes to Smartsystems

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Unlocking CDI's Future: From SOAP Notes to Smartsystems

Becker’s Healthcare Podcast | November 3, 2025
Host: Erica Spicer Mason
Guests:

• Dr. Jerilyn Morrissey, Chief Medical Officer, Koro Health
• Kaltrina Barisha, VP of Product Management, Koro Health

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the evolution of clinical documentation integrity (CDI) from its earliest days—ancient Egypt’s papyrus records—to today’s fast-moving AI “smartsystems.” Dr. Jerilyn Morrissey and Kaltrina Barisha of Koro Health join host Erica Spicer Mason to discuss how today's technological innovations can address the unsustainable administrative burdens facing clinicians, re-infuse meaning into documentation, and prepare organizations for a rapidly shifting landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Guest Backgrounds & Choro Health’s Mission

[00:59–02:24]

• Dr. Morrissey: Diverse experience beginning in primary care, then transitioning to revenue cycle roles across both the payer and provider sides, with a recent emphasis on Medicare Advantage regulations.
• Kaltrina Barisha: 15+ years partnering with clinicians to create tech solutions that streamline healthcare workflows, strengthen CDI, and ensure compliance.

2. The Historical Evolution of Medical Documentation

[03:11–07:31]

• Dr. Morrissey draws a throughline from ancient Egyptian papyrus records (ca. 2000 BC) to modern EHRs.
  • Notable Quote:

    "What really stands out to me is that as we trace the history of physician documentation...observation and exam findings and diagnoses and treatment plans, we can trace those exact elements all the way through history up until 2025." — Dr. Morrissey, [04:02]

  • While core documentation elements remain, layers of regulatory and billing requirements have made the process burdensome.
  • The transition from paper to electronic documentation has created a "battlefield" where multiple stakeholders' priorities—clinical, financial, regulatory—collide.
  • Efforts to address complexity (adding reviews, queries, layers) have led to clinician disengagement and administrative overload.
  • Notable Commentary:

    "...the solutions have frequently been to add more, add more layers, add more reviews, add more queries. Now we've gotten to this unsustainable point in history where the administrative overload on documentation has resulted in clinician disengagement." — Dr. Morrissey, [06:27]

3. The Promise of AI & Smartsystems in Documentation

[08:30–10:07]

• Kaltrina Barisha discusses how generative and agentic AI are finally bridging the gap between documentation as a compliance tool and as a clinical decision-support resource.
  • Advanced AI now interprets clinical intent, surfaces insights, and guides in real time, all while decreasing clinician workload.
  • The CDI process gains accuracy and value ("making documentation meaningful again" [10:07]), leading to faster chart reviews, fewer denials, and a more robust revenue cycle.
  • Notable Quote:

    "Now with generative AI...we're creating systems that actually understand clinical context. So they don't just capture what's said, they're interpreting intent, they're surfacing insights, and even guiding clarifications in real time." — Kaltrina Barisha, [08:52]

  • The goal: clinicians focus on care; tech handles the backend.

4. Actionable Steps for Future-Ready CDI

[10:38–13:01]

• Dr. Morrissey’s Two Key Recommendations:

  1. Deepen Understanding of Terminology & Tools:
     Grasp what automation, analytics, NLP, generative AI, and agentic AI actually are (not just buzzwords).
     • Notable Quote:

       "...if you get the wrong product, that doesn't solve your problem because the term was used in a...loosey goosey manner, you're going to end up disappointed." — Dr. Morrissey, [11:51]

  2. Be Bold—Constructively Destructive:
     Challenge legacy workflows designed for manual processes; update or discard them for a tech-centric world.
     Fail forward: rapid adaptation enables success.

• Erica Spicer Mason (Host) summarizes:

  • Step 1: Learn what these new technologies really mean and do.
  • Step 2: "Be bold, constructively destructive."
  • Don't be afraid to fail; be agile.

5. Collaboration & Looking Ahead

[13:30–14:25]

• Kaltrina Barisha urges pairing smart tools with ongoing feedback, training, and collaboration among clinicians, CDI, and operational leaders.
  • Effective technology adoption boosts trust, improves outcomes, and centers the "patient story."
  • Notable Quote:

    "When we as clinicians and AI collaborate in the workflow, we're not just improving efficiency, we're improving outcomes and we're really improving trust as well." — Kaltrina Barisha, [14:08]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “In the practice of medicine, we knew from the beginning what needed to be documented and communicated, not only to care for our patients, but also to advance the field of medicine.” — Dr. Morrissey, [04:48]
• “We created this battlefield where financial, clinical and payer priorities all collide and they all want something from the documentation.” — Dr. Morrissey, [06:00]
• "It makes documentation meaningful again. It becomes a live in, intelligent part of care, not just a compliance checkbox." — Kaltrina Barisha, [09:53]
• “Constructively destructive. So we need to look at workflows and procedures...that were designed to support manual processes. You can't just take those workflows and procedures and processes and put them into a technological world and expect the improvement that you need.” — Dr. Morrissey, [12:18]
• “Improving trust and the overall patient story...is the most important aspect of all of this.” — Kaltrina Barisha, [14:20]

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 00:59–02:24 | Guest Introductions and Choro Health’s Mission
• 03:11–07:31 | Historical Overview of Medical Documentation and Lessons Learned
• 08:30–10:07 | How Modern AI Technologies Are Changing the Purpose of Documentation
• 10:38–13:01 | Actionable Steps for Leaders to Prepare for CDI’s Future
• 13:30–14:25 | The Importance of Collaboration and Keeping the Patient at the Center

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Conclusion

This episode offers a compelling journey through the history and future of clinical documentation—from ancient papyrus to smart AI-driven systems. Dr. Morrissey and Kaltrina Barisha challenge healthcare leaders to:

• Rigorously discern the capabilities and limits of new AI-driven solutions,
• Boldly redesign workflows for a digital-first era,
• And maintain relentless focus on the patient narrative.

Summary in One Line:
As the boundaries of technology in healthcare documentation expand, the key to integrity and value is to harness “smart” tools that free clinicians to care for patients and elevate the patient story—rather than simply check compliance boxes.

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Transcript

[A]

Hello, everyone. This is Erica Spicer Mason with Becker's Healthcare. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series today. So today we're going to talk about unlocking CDI's future, from soap notes to smart systems. And joining me for this conversation, we have with us two leaders from Koro Health. We have Dr. Jerilyn Morrissey, the Chief Medical Officer, and Kaltrina Barisha, Vice President of Products management. This is Dr. Morrissey. Kaltrina, thank you so much again for making time for this today.

[B]

Our pleasure. So happy to be here with you. Erika, thanks for inviting us.

[A]

Yeah, so thrilled to have you both with us. And I thought to get us started, it would be helpful for our listeners to hear just a little bit more about you. Dr. Morrissey and Kaltrina, I know Choral Health, we've had some. This is not your first podcast episode by any means, but just thought it'd be helpful to give our listeners a sense of where you're coming from and your background in healthcare. Dr. Morrissey, do you wanna get us started?

[B]

Thanks.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Happy to. So, as you said, I'm Dr. Geralyn Morsi. I am currently the Chief medical officer at ChoroHealth. ChoroHealth has a suite of technology solutions in the revenue cycle to support both payers and providers. And we try to remove the friction in that relationship. And my background has been diverse. I started off practicing primary care and then transitioned into revenue cycle where I've worked for both the payer and the provider side of things. And most recently I've been really focused on regulatory expertise in the Medicare. Medicare Advantage space. Krina.

[C]

Yeah. Well, thank you for. For this great podcast and inviting us. And my name, as you mentioned, is Katrina Verisha and I am the Vice President of Product Management for Coral Health. I lead our product life cycle and some strategy for the different solutions that Dr. Morrissey just mentioned. I've spent as a product leader my last 15 years really working closely with clinicians and health systems to create solutions that bring together complex healthcare workflows and advanced technology. So solutions that support cdi, support better clinical decision, and really streamlining the revenue cycle process and last but not least, ensuring compliance.

[A]

Well, it's so great to learn more about you both. Thank you again for sharing a bit more about your backgrounds. And it was also great to see Choral Health at Becker's Health IT event this fall. For listeners who may not know, Coral Health actually hosted a summit at the event. It was a great conversation. Dr. Morrissey, I wanted to just have you elaborate a little bit more on something that you talked about at the summit there, you shared that there's. There was this fascinating evolution of medical documentation that started essentially in ancient case reviews in Egypt, and it's evolved to the modern ehr. So would love to hear a little bit more about that from you and the lessons that you think are most relevant from that journey or evolution as we're entering this AI era of clinical documentation integrity.

[B]

Well, I think the secret's out, Erika, that I'm a student of history. I'm a strong believer that if we understand the past, it'll help improve where we're going and we don't repeat the same mistakes. And I loved tying that all together during that summit for folks, because what really stands out to me is that as we trace the history of physician documentation, and like we talked about at the summit, it dates all the way back to 2000 B.C. in Egypt, where the first medical records on Papyrus documented some core elements like observation and exam findings and diagnoses and treatment plans, that we can trace those exact elements all the way through history up until 2025. And there's still core elements to physician and provider documentation. What that tells me is that in the practice of medicine, we knew from the beginning what needed to be documented and communicated, not only to care for our patients, but also to advance the field of medicine and the study of the science that is involved there. Now, as time went on, that documentation met up with advances in technology, and those advances in technology were occurring in a parallel path. And we moved from papyrus to paper, eventually to technology and electronic documentation. And with that, there were good things that came from it and not so good things that came from it. And of course, the biggest transition that we've had historically has been the transition from paper to the electricity, electronic medical record, or emr. And with that transition, one of the things that I think we often lose track of is we took those core findings of observations, exam findings, diagnosis and treatment. And we said, okay, now we also want meticulous documentation that allows for advances that are going on in coding and billing and advances that are going on with regulatory and compliance. And we also want to use it to prevent errors and ensure quality and use clinical pathways and optimize workflows and have interoperability and portability and any other ability that you can think of that I haven't just listed. And with that came just eons and gobs and gobs and gobs of data. And so now we could analyze all of that so with the merge between documentation and technology, we created this battlefield where financial, clinical and payer priorities all collide and they all want something from the documentation. And that tension that every provider, every organization out there feels is the reality of this intersection of all these competing priorities. And unfortunately, again, studying history, as hospitals and health systems have tried to solve or alleviate that tension, the solutions have frequently been to add more, add more layers, add more reviews, add more queries. Now we've gotten to this unsustainable point in history where the administration, administrative overload on documentation has resulted in clinician disengagement. And it's almost like what we've been striving for with all of this advanced technology is kind of starting to fall apart, and that's not the direction we needed to go, and that's not optimizing documentation integrity and the role that technology can play in documentation integrity. And that's where Kaltrina and I have really been focused on. We want our providers caring for our communities and health systems where they bring the biggest value, and that's at the bedside with the patient. We want them focusing their time and efforts there and on the treatments and helping patients, not on learning the recent coding and billing rules so that they document with the utmost of specificity. And that's where we think technology can come in and really help to alleviate some of that administrative burden and help resolve some of that clinician disengagement.

[A]

Dr. Morrissey, what storytelling. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with our listeners. I can't say on another podcast episode I've ever talked about, 2000 BC in Egypt, so this is a first. And, but truly, jokes aside, it's a really important, I think, evolution that you've noted and how we've gotten to a point where things are feeling unsustainable for clinicians, for back end teams, and now it's almost as if we need to take the wonderful technology advancements that we have in front of us, but have them simplify things back to make them feel simple as they were many, many years ago. So thank you so much again for sharing all of that. And Kaltrina, I'd love to now kick it over to you to get some more insight on the product and operations side of things. So how do you see those technologies bridging the gap between clinical documentation, you know, not just as a compliance task, but also as a real tool for clinician understanding and decision support?

[C]

Yeah, that's, that's a great question. I think we're, we're finally Seeing technology close this long standing gap between documentation as a compliance task and a tool for true real clinical insight. Right. So for years documentation was about billing and audits necessary, truly necessary, but it didn't always add value for clinicians.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And so as I mentioned at the, at the summit, now with generative AI, which is more advanced technology and the emerging agentic AI, we're creating systems that actually understand clinical context. So they don't just capture what's said, they're interpreting intent, they're surfacing insights and even guiding clarifications in real time. That's especially powerful if we're talking about prevail CDI where identifying gaps or indicators early means stronger accuracy and integrity without really slowing down our clinicians. And as Dr. Morrissey mentioned, the goal is to make sure that our clinicians are truly focused on helping our community and our patients out there and let us do the back end and really integrate an AI as a true assistant to their day to day from an operations lens. That drives huge efficiency, faster chart reviews, faster, fewer denials, and really an overall cleaner revenue cycle process. So I think more importantly though, it makes documentation meaningful again. It becomes a live in, intelligent part of care, not just a compliance checkbox.

[A]

Making documentation meaningful again. I really appreciate that phrase. Kaltrina, thanks so much for sharing your insights. And I think it's important also to kind of walk our listeners through what, what you both see is ahead. Dr. Morrissey, maybe you can take this one. What's one actionable step that you would recommend to leaders to really strengthen their CDI programs and maybe even more importantly, really position their organizations to adapt to change that's inevitably ahead?

[B]

Well, Erica, I hope you'll indulge me. I'm going to go with two instead of just one. I think anybody listening who's involved in healthcare is going to agree with this statement that, you know, unsustainable economics are converging with powerful advances in technology and science right now and innovations are accelerating. And so anybody listening to this could probably pop into their email box and see a million emails out there with organizations promising automation and generative AI and natural language processing and machine learning models. And my first recommendation for an actionable step is, if you haven't done it already, really get an understanding about what all those terms mean. What is automation? What is analytics? What is natural language processing? What is generative AI? What is agentic AI? I see those phrases thrown around so much and they're often used interchangeably or like they're synonyms and they're absolutely not synonyms. They all do different things. And so if you get the wrong product, that doesn't solve your problem because the term was used in a what I'll call a loosey goosey manner, you're going to end up disappointed. So that would be the first thing that I would say and recommend is, is the first actionable step, the second actionable step, which is to be bold. We have to be bold as we move forward, and that means that we have to be what I'd call constructively destructive. So we need to look at workflows and procedures that we have followed for years on years that were designed to support manual processes. You can't just take those workflows and procedures and processes and put them into a technological world and expect the improvement that you need. We have to be willing to look at those and say, does that workflow still make sense with a technology added in? And then I think with those two things combined as your first steps, as you're entering into these things, you're really going to find that you're going to get success faster. Don't be afraid to fail, but be agile when you fail and use that as your guiding light.

[A]

Love that. So sounds like getting that foundational understanding of the differences between AI, natural language processing, automation, understanding. They're not synonymous. Step one. Step two, be bold, constructively destructive. Like you said, Dr. Morrissey, I think these are fantastic and actionable tips that listeners can take away. Kaltrina, what comes up for you here? Is there anything we didn't touch on or any final thoughts that you wanted to leave us with?

[C]

I would just say that we are an exciting point in health care technology. You know, with generative AI and agentic AI interoperability and the FHIR frameworks have really been helping physicians finally and CDI teams and health system to work together more efficiently. Right. And so I think technology and regulations will continue to evolve. So organizations that pair smart tools with ongoing feedback loops and training and collaboration between clinicians, CDIs and really operational leaders as well, will be best positioned to stay ahead. So. So, you know, my recommendation is that when we as clinicians and AI collaborate in the workflow, we're not just improving efficiency, we're improving outcomes and we're really improving trust as well and the overall patient story. Right. Which is the most important aspect of all of this.

[A]

Yeah, appreciate that note ending on the importance of the patient story. I know that's what ties you both back to your work and so many other listeners back to what they do every day in healthcare. So, Dr. Morrissey Kaltrina, thank you again for this great discussion today and for making time for Beckers. I really appreciate it.

[B]

Thanks, Eric. It's always our pleasure.

[A]

And we'd also like to thank our podcast sponsor for today, CORO Health listeners, please be sure to tune into more episodes from Becker by visiting our podcast [e-mail].