Baptist is four hospitals and over thirty-five clinics. We are all over middle Alabama. We had as low as a thirty-five percent pre-registration, preauthorization rate in our hospitals.

That created all kinds of issues for us in terms of quality and data, denials on the back end and so we knew we needed to address that issue somehow to improve our percentage.

Coordinator was by far the best solution. It offered us some things that we didn’t even consider. There would be additional physicians that would be tied to our facilities because of the increased pre-registration.

We put a team in place to manage all the pre-registration for all four hospitals and we went to work in refining the system.

The procedure code is 29827. It is outpatient and I do - -

Actually have six or seven staff that are making phone calls, that are verifying insurance, that are calling patients back to say this is your time of arrival, this is what you need to bring, these are the kinds of things that you need to expect once you arrive. And we also have people at the facilities that coordinate with the patients.

The Company is Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield, okay.

When we started we had eighty-four physicians that were using pre arrival service to the coordinator. Now we have over seven hundred physicians that are using the service. It’s such a positive thing for the physicians and takes responsibilities off the office staff so they can do other things in the office.

I’m a neurologist practicing in the City of Talladega, Alabama. We are an as follows practice. We see somewhere around twenty to twenty-two patients a day. I order a lot of testing like CT scans, EEG’s, MRI of the brain and one of the problems before was if I order an MRI in the middle of busy clinic my receptionist may not do it the same day. She may not fill the form, schedule the appointment, call the insurance company, get it approved and in that process you can lose orders.

Now it is much easier to do your job. It is a free service. They come in, set you up, give you an account. You basically log into your account and order the test.

When the data is entered into the coordinator system the system automatically produces an electronic medical order for the physician, which electronically is transferred to the hospital.

Sure, okay.

The hospital will call the patient, schedule an appointment for the patient, bring them in, perform the test and then fax you the result. With Coordinator it’s a very seamless procedure.

athenaCoordinator is as simple as using Yahoo or ordering something on Ebay. Everybody that is familiar with a computer can handle this system.

Every patient that goes to the doctor and learns that they need the hospitalization has some degree of anxiety. We don’t want them to have to deal with that anxiety when they get to the facility. They should be focused on their health, not their business worries. The business worry should have been taken care of in advance and that’s the approach we take.

No, that’s all for right now. Thank you very much.

Once they verify the insurance, get the approvals, they call the patient back and tell the patient what to expect to pay at the time of service. We offer loans, we offer credit cards, echeck. There’s a lot of different ways the patients can pay that and we had increased patient satisfaction because instead of getting multiple calls it was like one stop shopping.

We allow physicians to spend more time practicing medicine and less time worrying about the business aspects of care. We create a greater coordination between the doctors, the hospitals, all the providers. We make it seamless for the patients and we try to make everyone have a good patient experience.

Thank you very much for coming.