Evaluating and maintaining data quality is complex in any industry. However, the uniquely complex and non-stop aspects....

Today, a carefully planned customer communications strategy needs to be an integral...

In the midst of sweeping healthcare reform, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO)...

Hartford Hospital was able to increase early, 11 a.m. discharge from 9.5 percent...

Predictive modeling in healthcare represents a cataclysmic shift from more traditional...

Home healthcare in the United States, the fastest-growing sector in healthcare...

Hospitals of all sizes continue to be challenged by outmoded workforce-management...

It was, as the song goes, oh so simple then. Manufacturing and sales data...

The healthcare industry has consistently been stable, responding well to changes in the economic climate...

Health information technology (HIT) has been ranked the top issue facing health provider...

There are many ways to combat the nursing shortage, but most of them are not...

For our April issue, HMT put together a roundup on "Implementing Meaningful Use Objectives," asking selected industry experts....

The past five years have brought a drastic rise in health insurance...

The past five years have brought a drastic rise in health insurance...

The past five years have brought a drastic rise in health insurance...

By now it is common knowledge that digitizing and managing workflow electronically...

There has always been a comfortable marriage between healthcare...

The spotlight will be on compliance with Stage 1 meaningful-use (MU) criteria. One of the key components of compliance...

The vast amount of data collected throughout the healthcare system could undoubtedly provide facilities with the knowledge and opportunity to target...

Many hospitals are behind the curve in implementing a certified electronic health record (EHR) or contending with their existing data exchange...

The warning signs are blaring. The universe of articles, Webinars, conferences and consultants is expanding. Yes, ICD-10 is here to...

As we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21st century, industry insiders weigh in...

The economic challenges of the past decade have placed hospitals under unrelenting pressures to reduce costs while maintaining quality. With most of the stray dollars already found, any further cost-cutting initiatives will likely bring wit...

In July 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services released the final regulation defining meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs), based on which clinicians and hospitals can qualify for incentive payments authorized by the Health Information...

Advanced Plan for Health (APH) creates custom plans for self-insured healthcare employers by building and analyzing longitudinal claims-based patient records to find patterns and healthcare trends that can cut...

President John F. Kennedy once said, "There are risks and costs to any program of action, but they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable...

Stage 1 of meaningful use is now finalized, and provider incentives will certainly result in an increased use of certified electronic health records...

The effort to access and manage healthcare information online is well underway, and for good reason: it's one way healthcare providers and health plans can rein in the cost of administering...

Today, as the use of mobile devices like iPhones and BlackBerrys increases on the job, so does easy access to social networking sites, such as Twitter, Facebook...

Radiology work flow has experienced dramatic change in the last few years.

For years, hospital IT departments have been responding to the need to automate clinical systems, such as electronic health records (EHR) and computer physician order entry (CPOE), throughout their facilities. Without a doubt, the digitization of clinical documents is a boon — both for quality of care and increased efficiency.

For almost a hundred years, Underwood-Memorial has been keeping track of patient records, and while the basic intent of this record keeping has remained consistent, the volume of records, the speed with which records need to be accessed and the legislation governing the handling of these records have all changed dramatically. In particular, we have implemented the Cerner Millennium system to help us improve the quality and efficiency of our delivery of care. This new electronic health record (EHR) system has given us the ability to combine operational and clinical information, while accessing relevant patient information.

PacMed adopts a real-time locating system to improve processes, safety and the bottom line.

The care needs and documentation required to meet today's healthcare standards compel caregivers to expect more time and information from patients and processes than ever before. While there are tools to help make documentation easier, healthcare has traditionally lacked a good system to allow caregivers to "right-size" time with patients.

With all the talk about electronic medical records and meaningful use, it's easy to put health information exchanges (HIEs) on the back burner. But that's not an option. Communicating in a digital healthcare world without HIEs is like trying to navigate a highway system with no freeways.

The transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 — mandated to occur by Oct. 1, 2013, for organizations subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — is expected to improve care-management quality and enhance reimbursement accuracy. The transition, however, is expected to be costly and labor intensive; the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) estimates the cost to providers alone at $3 billion through 2017.

Comprehensive, accurate, up-to-date and accessible information on healthcare providers is a key to successful healthcare business management. Most organizations, however, have neither accurate nor up-to-date information on their providers. Moreover, information that is captured is contained in multiple silos, reduced to paper files, rarely shared and never used to control costs.

Increased profits, streamlined operations and a strengthened financial position are all benefits of the right type of RCM implementation.

A successful revenue-cycle management (RCM) program creates opportunities for healthcare providers to increase profits, streamline operations and strengthen the financial backbone of their practice or institution. RCM implementations also provide opportunities for things to "go wrong." When not addressed, certain obstacles can impact the level of adoption, efficacy and financial impact. By taking into account the most-common problem areas, healthcare providers can increase their chances of a successful program.

System provides physician practice with streamlined work flow, easy user interface, filing templates, reduced costs, and organization and multitasking of documents.

ChoiceCare Physicians, an eight-doctor private-practice physicians' group specializing in physical medicine and rehabilitation, was using a dated electronic medical record (EMR) program and found that it was not meeting expectations. The office had a filing room full of charts that nurses or other staff would spend hours in, looking for charts for their next-day appointments. Sometimes, they could not find a chart. Since diagnostic reports are in constant demand, staffers could not afford to have a chart go missing or spend hours tracking their progress through the current system. Also, if a patient called wanting results, finding their report took a long time.

Like many emergency rooms throughout North America, Cambridge Memorial Hospital had a practical, hands-on system for tracking patients and treatments: a large whiteboard mounted on the wall that could be quickly updated with felt-tip markers. The whiteboard was easy to see, easy to modify and it enabled both clinicians and administrators to keep a close eye on emergency room (ER) activities. The problem was that the whiteboard was not extensible. Staff could not obtain information from the board unless they were standing in front of it and the board could only be updated with information already known to staff in the ER. This traditional manual whiteboard did not present any new information to the department's providers.

Software-as-a-service model sends data electronically to multiple facilities, easing case-management staff workload.

At Falls Church, Va.-based Inova Health System, up to two full days were needed to process and receive a reply on a simple nursing home referral: gathering, copying and collating paper records, faxing them to the facility, playing phone tag with facility staff, talking with staff, relaying information to patient and family, responding to requests for more information from the facility— and doing it all again for the next facility.

Program at Methodist Healthcare starts after an in-depth evaluation of printing needs, outsourcing costs and use of technology.

An outdated paper-based system creates roadblocks in the flow of patient data. Overhauling this system is a major project for any healthcare facility, requiring the careful selection of appropriate systems, proper implementation, and the understanding and cooperation of staff members.

BayCare Health Systems implements palm-vein recognition technology to streamline and secure patient processing.

The first step in patient safety is correctly identifying patients at the point of entry to the healthcare facility (including matching them to the correct medical record). As the increasing number of cases of medical identity theft have shown, however, conventional identification processes are no longer adequate and present numerous issues that continue to put a patient's safety at risk. These include simple clerical errors, technological failures and even dishonest patients misrepresenting their identity.

The continued use of manual processes raised a real concern for program changes and tracking with newer and more robust state and federal regulations.

Community Health Plan (CHP) in Washington faced several challenges that needed to be addressed in order to achieve its goal of deploying a patient-centric delegated care-management system. For years, care managers at CHP used multiple, disparate systems for case management (CM), disease management (DM) and utilization management (UM) — resulting in information silos. Without an integrated system, there
was a lack of evidence-based clinical pathways to ensure consistent care planning and management of patients. As a result, data collection was not robust, tracking was inadequate and reporting was not streamlined.

The ultimate challenge was balancing two fundamental regulations — a requirement that drugs in the OR be immediately and readily available, and another necessitating medication security at all times.

One of the most logistically challenging areas of the hospital for medication distribution is the operating room (OR). This is particularly true for institutions such as the Erie County Medical Center (ECMC), with service lines that necessitate 24/7 OR capabilities.

Many providers have found that content management lends itself to automating transactions and managing content in a single location.

Healthcare providers are used to processes. From billing to patient registration to accounts payable, they operate under rules and regulations, policies and procedures. Audits are processes, too. The recovery audit contractor (RAC) program, for example, is an audit. It starts with a record request from the auditor. Upon receipt of the request, the provider has a strictly enforced 45-day deadline to respond. Once the response is received, the RAC can deem an overpayment occurred. Then, the provider has the option to appeal the decision.

Memorial Hermann is one of the largest not-for-profit healthcare systems in Texas, serving the greater Houston area through 11 acute-care hospitals, a large network of affiliated physicians, and numerous specialty programs and services. Its system-driven centralized model involves the coordination of several work processes and products, including billing, coding, pricing and contracting.

"We use a monthly operations review process, designed to identify performance variances and define preemptive actions," says Helen Powers, system executive for revenue operations, decision support and Medicare profitability for Memorial Hermann. "All business operations are reviewed on how well they achieve the health system's overarching goals of quality, operational excellence, customer satisfaction and growth. Under this model, the revenue-operations department carefully manages cash flow and days in accounts receivable."

CAC does not eliminate the need for medical-coding professionals to be involved in the coding process, but it can make them more productive and accurate.

Technology has finally arrived that is radically changing the process of medical coding in health-information management. Computer-assisted coding (CAC) automatically generates medical codes directly from clinical documentation. With CAC technology, healthcare organizations can streamline their revenue-cycle processes while becoming more compliant with the increasingly complex payer and quality reporting requirements.

Platform offers advanced radiology features, while meeting the integration and image-distribution needs of the IT staff.

Most U.S. healthcare providers are now approaching their second- or third-generation of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS). The staff at St. John Health System in Tulsa, Okla., was no different. They were looking for a standards-based PACS that facilitated integration with existing hospital information systems and radiology information systems (HIS/RIS), as well as existing imaging archives. The St. John staff also needed a platform with advanced features to improve diagnostic accuracy, while simultaneously boosting productivity.

The Future of Consulting

By Rob Merkel, IBM Global Business Services

Consulting services for the healthcare industry are in the midst of tremendous change. While cost and quality issues continue to drive the need for transformation across the industry, advances in technology and government stimulus will accelerate the rate at which it is implemented. In particular, three trends will shape the future of services.

First, technology advances are providing a foundation for capturing, sharing and analyzing information. As the industry becomes more interconnected and instrumented, a proliferation of both structured and unstructured data will be captured and shared to significantly improve care delivery and individual health.