WAITING FOR A PUNCHLINE?

How many computer applications and manual processes are required to service the business needs of a typical hospital? Sounds like the setup to a joke, but the answer for most hospitals foretells a serious productivity dilemma.

Traversing from one computer application to the next, then scurrying to access unstructured paper documents frustrates employees and creates inefficiencies in a hospital’s operations. Increased business demands combined with a “the way it has always been done” mentality is a recipe for stagnation, decreased productivity and unnecessary expense.

A DAY IN THE LIFE

A typical day in the life of a hospital’s business office manager consists of accessing between five to ten different applications along with dozens of paper data sources. For example, employees may move from patient profiles within the EHR to signed, paper forms located in a paper chart in a file room. Then, insurance requires yet more convoluting access strategies with insurance bills accessed in claims scrubbers or in-patient accounting systems – depending upon the required need.

Payment reviews also occur over various platforms with 835 remittance data perhaps being downloaded and exported to various analytics tools for reviews of denials, failed medical necessity and cash posting analysis. And, paper remittances might be stored in physical charts in the business office. Then, to compare insurance payments against bank data, employees may need to pull both internal system data and external data from bank websites and lock-box downloads.

What’s more, managers must assure patient registrations are complete and contain all required documents by physically reviewing paper charts completed by patients, registrars and financial councilors. Are all required documents signed and all mandatory data collected? Were any documents lost between registration and the back-office?

WHAT IS YOUR GAMEPLAN?

Think about it … How are your users accessing non-EMR documents and images in your EMR? After all, this is the key to a complete legal record and will soon be critical to achieving Meaningful Use.

Ask yourself about non-patient-specific workflows as well. How many hours did you pay out in the last cycle? How much sick time has your staff accrued? How many widgets did you order last month? Are all of your nurses up-to-date with their certifications?

While reviewing employees, it may be a good time to review how staff is accessing patient data. What records have they been seeing? What charts have they checked out in Medical Records? Has anyone been making copies of PHI, perhaps for Release of Information purposes? What are the reasons why staff might be emailing patient data to other users?

At the end of the day, employees may have traversed over a dozen systems and information sources, logging in and out of many applications, multiple times each day. Hours are wasted walking from office to chart room, mailroom to printer room. Not to mention interruptions occurring as users socialize while en-route to access paper documentation.

And, since information demands continue to increase while bandwidth remaining the same, users are drowning in inefficiency because of a lack of interoperability.

IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY

Dbtech Ras has been aggregating disparate systems for years and offers an eloquent solution for optimizing workflows while unifying data. Whether system content resides in billing, payroll, materials management, paper charts or bank lock-boxes, our seamless unifying solution can meet all data requirements.

Additionally, many hospitals find that their legacy applications and new EMR’s are excellent sources for data collection, but less than adequate for presenting data to users in a concise and consolidated manner. It’s not surprising that users without a platform like Ras waste hours every day navigating applications and physical sources of data.

Ras can also serve as an information portal solution that is relevant today in your current environment and tomorrow as you migrate to new platforms.

And the best part is that Ras is simple to use and implement. Our support staff has earned customer praise consistently for the last twenty years.

Achieve platform interoperability today with Ras!
Contact us for more information.

DEALING WITH DOWNTIME

One of the greatest burdens with which any business contends is a disruption to the flow of information. When it comes to healthcare, the ramifications are even greater. When your information system’s software/hardware fails, patient care must continue. And, regardless of whether you face a scheduled downtime or an unanticipated failure, critical patient information must continue to be delivered to caregivers.

What’s more, those who know the hospital’s revenue cycle, recognize that poor data collection at registration leads to decreased remittances and diminished patient care. When hospital systems shut down, the quality of data suffers even further.

According to Healthcare Informatics, every minute of HIS downtime costs more than $264 for an average 500-bed hospital. That means each incremental 1% of downtime per year could cost a 500-bed hospital more than $1.4 million.

How do you plan to collect data, register patients and complete critical forms – even when normal workflows are thrown out the window?

THE SOLUTION

Fortunately, Ras customers can continue to register new patients and proceed with business as usual even when hospital registration systems go down, by simply adding new patient accounts through the Rasi interface.

Typically, this registration process is automated by the Ras HL7 interface. But, In downtime situations, this Ras function can prove integral to your contingency workflow process. Instead of recording new patient registration data on paper, Ras customers just type the data into customizable screens.

When information systems come back online, Ras can transmit the HL7 transactions back to your standard registration systems. The process is seamless and saves your organization both time and money by eliminating the need to record data both on paper and then again into systems when they come back online.

WHAT ABOUT REGISTRATION FORMS?

Many hospitals drive the creation of waivers and releases through HL7 transactions from their registration systems, but what happens when these same systems are down? How are critical forms created, and how is the data collected? The most common solution is to have registration staff write down the required patient data on blank forms.

The beauty of Ras as a downtime solution is that when staff registers patients into Ras, all patient data is merged with eForms. Forms are automatically printed with accurate patient data, barcodes are generated and electronic patient signature processes continue as normal.

But the challenge of a downtime isn’t just about recording NEW data; it’s also about accessing previously-collected data. Ras serves this need by storing and presenting critical patient clinical and financial data even when major Hospital Information Systems are down. This allows your staff access to patient history of orders, medication administration records and discharge summaries when Siemens, Meditech, McKesson or Epic are down.

You don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on technology-driven solutions like real-time data redundancy and offsite data replication. Instead, look to a simple, inexpensive solution in dbtech Ras.

For more information on using Ras as a downtime solution, please contact us.

THE STEPS TO ICD-10 In our last installment, we discussed the merits of using dbtech tools to mitigate ICD-10 report discovery. Here, we will go deeper into the project plan to analyze the benefits of chart analysis, financial contingency planning, and forms inventory. While ICD-10 project plans may differ slightly based on size, infrastructure and services, all projects will include the following major task categories:

Here at dbtech, we wish your organization all the luck in the world as you complete your 5010 project plans and move forward with ICD-10 projects. It’s a formidable task, but with dbtech’s solutions, you can help ease the implementation.

For more information about ICD-10 planning, please contact us.

THE PAPERLESS OFFICE

While detractors have derailed the idea as impossible, dbtech has always chased the promise of the paperless office. We believe this progression is not only possible, but that it can be achieved by eliminating paper with technology and workflow redesigns that fit patient expectations.

Dbtech’s newest enhancements, eForms Interactive Forms and Signature Capture provide significant steps towards creating a paperless office, eliminating the expenses and inefficiencies of paper forms, while expanding your options for collecting structured data.

Until now, paper-based waivers and releases were signed by patients at registration. These forms come from a desk drawer or are printed on-demand through the eForms module. Either way, the patient still picks up a pen, signs a document, then returns it to the registrar for scanning into a document imaging platform (hopefully Rasi!).

Today, many hospitals are moving from this workflow towards ones that eliminate paper and provide an experience patients are well familiar with in other industries. Whether at the pharmacy, a local bank or a favorite automobile repair shop, consumers have grown accustomed to signing documents electronically. Many now even perceive ink-to-paper signatures as antiquated – and a sign of a technologically-stunted business.

USING INTERACTIVE eForms

When you pair a Topaz signature device with Interactive eForms and Signature Capture software, ink or wet signatures are eliminated, paper is removed and processes move smoothly.

And, the benefits do not end at registration. Throughout your facility, Interactive Forms eliminates inefficient paper forms while allowing you to leverage form data in new ways. For instance, many hospitals routinely utilize Case Managers and Financial Councilors to assist patients with financial aid through charity care programs. These programs often require multiple forms with data existing nowhere else in their information systems. With Interactive eForms, these paper forms are eliminated, inputs are validated, and form data is repurposed in XML format.

INTERACTIVE eForms & THE HOME HEALTH WORKER

When we began designing Interactive eForms, the initial goal was to address a home health workers’ need to collect data while in the field – specifically at the patient’s home. Using Rasi and eForms, we developed a workflow where interactive patient forms are emailed to homecare nurses. The nurse simply opens and completes forms at the patient’s home. Once the nurse reconnects to the internet, the form, and its data, is transmitted. This workflow modification saves days of work by eliminating the process of printing, writing and faxing forms between central offices and the homecare nurse.

Throughout the process, our development team focused on creating an interactive forms environment where data would be actionable, validated and used by any user without incremental cost. The forms had to be easy to create using a toolkit with which many IT analysts were already familiar. Thus, we selected Adobe Acrobat and PDF (the most widely-accepted and platform-agnostic file type in the healthcare industry) for creating and delivering forms.

Ask us about Interactive eForms and Signature Capture to start creating your paperless office today!

By now you’re likely wrapping up 5010 efforts and well into designing a project plan for ICD-10.

In this two-part post, we’ll illustrate how dbtech Ras is addressing these industry events to help you have a profitable and worry-free 2012.

A GIFT FROM THE OESS On November 17th, the CMS Office of E-Health Standards and Services (OESS) presented an early gift to the healthcare industry by delaying enforcement action on ASC X12 Version 5010 transaction standards. Providers must still meet the January 1st, 2012 deadline – but, those having issues with the process will not be penalized until after March 31st, 2012. You will be able to file complaints, but will need to show data illustrating a genuine effort to meet compliance requirements.

SO WHY THE DELAY?

Feedback indicates that the number of submitters, the volume of transactions, and other testing data used as indicators of the industry’s readiness to comply with the new standards have been low across some industry sectors. OESS has also received reports that many covered entities are still awaiting software upgrades!

Early adopters of dbtech’s Ras X12 5010 module are already capturing, converting and automating tasks related to payment and remittance transaction since May 2011. Dbtech has been working with ASC X 12 technologies since early in the process, and has always been ready to assist our clients in these transformative events.

But, 5010 is only a prelude to an even more momentous industry transformation! Most of us in healthcare today have never known a world other than that of ICD-9. On October 1^st, 2013, all of this will change. What’s more, ICD-10 will arguably be the largest and most costly change to healthcare in the last 30 years – much larger than even Y2K.

If you haven’t started your ICD-10 project by now, you’d better get moving … and fast.




THE STEPS TO ICD-10

While ICD-10 project plans may differ slightly based on size, infrastructure and services, all projects will include the following major task categories:

In the next installment we’ll cover the remaining steps critical to the success of your ICD-10 project plan. From interfaces, customer/employee marketing and education to contract negotiations, chart analysis, contingency planning and forms redesign, we’ll walk you through ICD-10 implementation. Stay tuned for part two!

For more information about ICD-10 planning, please contact us.