Methodist Healthcare, an integrated health system in Memphis, Tenn., is giving its revenue cycle management a boost by automating its paper-based practices.
The seven-hospital system recently implemented technology from Boston-based MedAptus, called Professional Charge Capture – Pro, for short – to replace its paper-based processes for inpatient coding and billing. As a result, the health system expects to drive revenue gains.
The health system selected the platform "because of its proven ability to deliver measurable efficiency improvements," said Bill Breen, senior vice president for physician alignment at Methodist Healthcare, in a statement. "By enabling our providers to complete charge capture with higher accuracy and better timeliness, we are reducing our charge lag, which increases cash flow. We also are finding productivity gains with our back-office personnel since transitioning to an exception-based workflow, as opposed to the multitude of paper hand-offs and manual reconciliation processes they contended with previously."
[See also: MedAptus, Intelligent Medical Objects partner for ICD-10 search.]
The first users of the platform at Methodist are cardiologists rounding at more than five owned and area hospitals. These initial technology adopters access Pro via the Web as well as iOS devices. As Breen describes it, a single Cerner registration interface provides patient census data from the Methodist hospitals in order to streamline the patient intake process, including verification of insurance and patient demographical information.
Hospitalists are the next group to go live with the software and will utilize Pro in the same manner as cardiologists.
"Our physicians have readily adopted the MedAptus technology due to its intuitive design and capabilities that reduce administrative burden on providers," said Alastair R. MacGregor, MD, chief healthcare information officer at Methodist Healthcare, in a statement. "And as we look down the line, seamless integration between the Pro system and our electronic health record via single sign-on and diagnosis passing will drive further clinician efficiency, permitting more time to deliver care."
[See also: Revenue cycle ripe for radical change.]
"The demands on providers' time increase every single year – more patients, more illness, more regulations," added said Gene Schneider, MedAptus president and CEO. "These realities inform our product development and keep our team focused on producing software that physicians will actually use and derive measurable benefit from."
