How are Hospital-Based Clinics Doing with athenahealth?
As our clients know, athenahealth is an established leader in group practice management. Now, with an increasing number of implementations in hospital owned or affiliated clinics, we check in with a few of these clients to see how they have leveraged athenahealth.
athenahealth's solutions are very relevant for hospital-based clinics, either in support of running profitable owned clinics or in support of an affiliate physician strategy via an MSO or as a complement to a community EHR strategy.
As a complement to a hospital's community EHR strategy, we are an attractive option for several reasons: we are an ASP delivered service, so there's no need to buy new server hardware. No upfront licensing fees. No lengthy integration efforts. We invite you to take a look at what our clients have to say and see firsthand how we can help make your owned and community ambulatory strategy more competitive, without distracting your staff from other hospital initiatives.
Just like group practice settings, athenahealth's practice management solutions improve profitability for hospital-owned systems. In addition, our solution seamlessly integrates with existing enterprise clinical systems. As a result, physicians can maintain fiscal independence while easily sharing clinical information with the hospital.
Lynchburg, Virginia-based Centra Health is one example. Now one of the state's leading health care systems providing comprehensive medical care to over 350,000 patients monthly through its 140 locations, its future was not always so bright. Before working with athenahealth, Centra Health encountered massive performance issues. Its in-house practice management system provided inaccurate and unreliable patient reports that, in the end, were dramatically lowering Centra Health's accounts receivable cycle.
athenahealth has proven to be a phenomenal tool for developing operational policies and procedures throughout Centra Health. Through workflow changes and a better understanding of the billing and claims collection process, the health care system was able to expand dramatically. For instance, in 2004, Centra Health leveraged athenahealth to create a Master Patient Index to interface with Centra Health's hospital registration system, resulting in massive operational and financial improvements across the health care system.
"Over the years our partnership with athenahealth has enabled Centra Health to expand our operation, design new ambulatory strategies and empower us to manage what is now a sprawling regional care delivery system that touches all corners of the state," said Tammy H. Tweedy, RN, Director of Centra Health Professional Services. Centra Health has also dramatically improved its practices' reporting capabilities. "Now reports are accurate and timely. Everything is instantaneous. I can get reports in three seconds as opposed to the past when I had to wait several hours for a report to generate, a report which, in many cases, wasn't always accurate," adds Tweedy.
Another example is The University of Kansas Medical Center. "Before athenahealth, our claims would drop and we wouldn't know why," said Tammy Shepherd, the chief financial officer for Medical Administrative Services. "We would find out 60 days into the process and then have to start over. Now, we see why the claims are dropping and which particular employee caused the error. It keeps the staff on their toes. Nothing is lost in the shuffle anymore."
With athenahealth, it's easier to see when the mistakes are made. Administrators are more accountable for their claims because the system can pinpoint missing slips and incorrect information in a claim. If an insurance number or billing code is entered incorrectly, athenahealth flags the error and immediately identifies why the claim will not drop clean.
The system has also considerably reduced the average claim's days in accounts receivable. Before athenahealth, a cardiology claim would usually spend roughly 65 days in accounts receivable. But now, thanks to the athenahealth staff's monitoring of every claim's progress that number has been lowered to roughly 35 days in accounts receivable. Outsourcing has also allowed KU Medical to dramatically decrease the size of its staff.
To learn more about how athenahealth can strengthen your health care system, contact us at 866.817.5738 or visit www.athenahealth.com/E1 to see our demo.