New Technology Can Boost Bottom Line for U.S. Hospitals
University of Pittsburgh Medical Center deploys a system aimed at capturing reimbursement for services.
Baltimore, MD (PRWEB via PR Web
Direct) June 23, 2005 -- Inaccurate and cumbersome paper-based patient
record systems are responsible for sizable financial losses at America's
hospitals. Large and small facilities alike are seeking better ways to capture
patient documentation in order to get more accurately reimbursed from insurance
companies. A new software system launched today at the University of Pittsburgh
Medical Center (UPMC) may be just what the doctor ordered to help hospitals
improve patient revenue.
Compliance+™
The new software system,
“Compliance+™, is the latest offering from the healthcare engineers at
Baltimore-based Salar, Inc. (www.Salarinc.com). Salar develops products that improve
healthcare quality through secure, paperless transactions and electronic medical
records.
Deployment at UPMC
Executives at UPMC have announced they are
implementing Compliance+™ in their Medical Procedures Unit (MPU) at UPMC
Presbyterian Hospital (http://presbyterian.upmc.com/). Some 60 physicians and nurses
will use the system with patients to document care. Initially, Compliance+™
documents will be printed and scanned into the hospital's document imaging and
chart completion system. Over time, as Compliance+™ is expanded to additional
areas within the hospital, UPMC plans to integrate it with their electronic
medical records (EMR) and ancillary systems.
UPMC is the first hospital
in the nation to use Compliance+™ after it had been pilot tested. The results of
the pilot, conducted at another leading academic medical center, showed an
increase of 12 percent in case mix index, a leading determinant for inpatient
revenues.
How It Works
Compliance+™ helps build hospital revenue
using a patent-pending technology that enables “Remote Concurrent Coding” (RCC).
RCC leads to more comprehensive and accurate documentation, which is the key to
hospital revenues.
Under the current system, hospitals review patient
charts and charges, and submit their claims to Medicare, Medicaid and private
insurers for services rendered only after the patient has been discharged. The
physician's diagnoses, tests, medications and other services are “coded” by
hospital coders based on the data in the chart, and a bill is generated. Once a
patient has been discharged the coding is rarely amended.
Coding and
billing are highly labor intensive. Hospital coders spend about 20 minutes
reviewing and coding each patient chart. More experienced coders will spend
approximately one hour on charts that are more complicated and extensive. As a
result, if documentation is incomplete, or if tests, medications or other
services are not captured from the chart and included in the billing, the
hospital suffers the financial loss. Compliance+™ significantly reduces this
risk of human oversight with a “remote concurrent coding” system, the first such
system ever to be developed for the hospital market.
With Compliance+™,
physicians begin the inpatient process as usual: by starting a patient chart.
Rather than writing patient information on standard paper, it is written on
“electronic paper.” The electronic paper is a tablet personal computer (PC). The
tablet PC captures clinical documentation immediately by software that is
incorporated into the workflow practices of physicians. Compliance+™ immediately
transmits the physician information throughout the hospital system to those
individuals who benefit from real-time review, such as the nursing, pharmacy and
billing staff.
Building Revenues Through Explicit Documentation, Better
Workflow
Hospitals also miss significant opportunities to accurately code and
bill because only a general diagnoses may be made at the time of admittance, or
the paperwork justifying the diagnosis is incomplete and therefore rejected by
the insurer. For example, if a physician writes “pneumonia” as the diagnosis in
the patient's chart, the hospital can code for “simple pneumonia.” If, however,
a physician more accurately writes the diagnosis as “pneumonia cased by
staphylococcus aureus” the hospital can legally code for a higher reimbursement.
In this case, the difference in reimbursement between “pneumonia” and “pneumonia
caused by staphylococcus aureus” could be thousands of dollars.
Integration with Other Hospital Information System
Vendors
Compliance+™ can be integrated with a variety of other existing
hospital information systems.
Benefits to Physicians and
Patients
Compliance+™ benefits also extend to physicians and their patients.
In addition to being physician-friendly, the system automatically transcribes
critical patient data from other parts of the hospital system – such as lab
results and medication orders – and “writes” them into the physician's
documentation. This feature dramatically reduces the amount of time that
physicians waste searching for patient data to make important clinical
decisions.
Conclusions
The degree to which Compliance+™ will help a
hospital improve its coding and billing procedures will differ depending upon
the hospital. Nevertheless, hospital executives can expect to see increased
operating efficiencies within months of installing the system in an environment
where the aphorism “time is money” is, without a doubt, appropriate.
About Salar, Inc.
Salar, Inc. (www.Salarinc.com) is a software technology company
specializing in solution-based products for hospitals and physicians. Salar's
Compliance+™ software is a first-of-its kind mobile product program.
Compliance+™ optimizes hospital billing revenues using comprehensive patient
documentation and remote concurrent coding, and improves hospital efficiencies.
Salar's TAP™ software system allows healthcare providers to access and update
patient information at the point of care via personal digital assistants (PDA)
and the web, thereby saving time and reducing administrative tasks for
physicians.
About UPMC
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center
(UPMC) is the largest integrated health care delivery system in Pennsylvania and
one of the leading nonprofit medical centers in the country. UPMC is a $5.3
billion, 39,000-employee organization and the largest employer in western
Pennsylvania.
More than 4,000 physicians have privileges at UPMC
hospitals, including about 1,950 employed physicians. UPMC spans the full
spectrum of health care delivery with its network of 19 tertiary, specialty and
community hospitals and 400 outpatient sites and doctors' offices. UPMC operates
the largest trauma center in Pennsylvania with over 409,000 emergency department
visits.
With more than 4,000 licensed beds, UPMC has 174,000 admissions
per year and 3 million outpatients visits. It is the largest provider of
independent living, assisted living and skilled nursing options in the region
with 14 freestanding retirement and long-term care facilities.
Editor's
Note: To schedule an interview with Salar's President Todd Johnson or UPMC's
Mark Hopkins, please contact Donna Krupa at 703.527.7357 (office), 703.967.2751
(cell) or e-mail protected from spam bots.
# # #
Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/6/prweb254760.htm