Doctoring Data

The paperwork heaped upon healthcare providers is sickening. The overwhelming volume generated by patient care, insurance claims and practice management alone is a major pain. Since automation can save time and improve efficiencies, while helping to speed payment cycles for care providers, the healthcare industry is increasingly looking to technology for a cure.

Several software companies are coming to the aid of the industry. As Tim Burns, sales manager for Misys Healthcare Systems (www.misyshealthcare.com), Raleigh, N.C., pointed out, “[Medical professionals] looking at spending a couple hundred thousand dollars on a system are going to want to know they are dealing with an established company that is financially stable. This is very important to physicians moving forward.”

Misys Healthcare Systems has been providing electronic clinical decision support and practice management tools for more than 25 years, including a total EMR (electronic medical records) solution. Misys EMR automates the administrative aspects of patients’ clinical data, such as chart notes, prescriptions, lab orders and transcription. There are also revenue cycle management tools, as well as online patient self-service links, which enable HIPAA-compliant secure communication between patients and healthcare providers.

“People purchase an EMR system to realize a return on investment,” noted Burns. “American Medical Association statistics show that it costs between $3 and $9 to [manually] pull and refile each chart, and approximately $7.50 when a chart cannot be found. This is just one way the system can save money and increase productivity.”

Other key areas of return are in transcription and coding. “Many physicians are under coding [for the patient services they perform], since there are heavy fines if they get caught over coding,” Burns explained. In addition to comprehensive, pre-defined, specialty-specific templates for documentation, the Misys Coding Assist feature allows users to evaluate their chart notes against CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) documentation guidelines to suggest the appropriate codes and ensure proper pay for performance.

Improved patient care is another upshot. “With an EMR system, doctors have access to patient information anywhere there is an Internet connection. In some practices where there are multiple locations, physicians are actually packing patient charts into locked suitcases and rolling them out to locations where they will be seeing patients that day,” continued Burns. “EMR is not only more convenient and secure, it also allows access to patient information from physicians’ homes, so in the event of an emergency, they can call into the ER with instruction on what to do and not do.”

By the Book

EMC Corporation (www.emc.com) is a leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions headquartered in Hopkinton, Mass. Sara Needham, public relations representative, noted that electronic tools play an important role in helping healthcare organizations meet stringent regulatory requirements related to all aspects of healthcare information management.

“Naturally, compliance requirements like HIPAA, legislative requirements for electronic health records and the growing public demand for increased security of private patient information are driving software adoption in the healthcare industry,” she observed. “Healthcare organizations are turning to technology to help them better capture, manage, secure and archive all types of patient documents and health information.”

To successfully offer software solutions, Needham said distributors must be knowledgeable about the solution, as well as the healthcare industry. “[Distributors] should have an understanding of the information life cycle in [an] organization, beginning with where content originates or how it enters the enterprise, and who touches the content throughout its life cycle.”

EMC offers a number of solutions that address many of the major information management challenges in the healthcare industry today: streamlining insurance claims and explanation of benefits forms processing; capturing, managing and archiving clinical and diagnostic images; publishing patient records via secure Web portals; improving patient record keeping; capturing paper documents and converting them to digital content for use in electronic health records; and developing disaster recovery solutions.

Needham believes software will continue to offer distributors opportunities to realize profits from both the software itself and the services integrators deliver to implement the complete solution. “Reseller margins vary widely depending on the vendor and product type, such as hardware, software and professional services,” she said. “Margins can also be misleading, since there is often a list price and a street price for each offering. Resellers can protect and extend their margins by packaging their value-added services with hardware and software, becoming a single point enterprise content management provider for their customers.”

Treatment Plans

Ottawa-based Applied Docs (www.applieddocs.com) is available as an ASP service or via a perpetual license model for capturing, verifying, managing and delivering data from paper and imaged sources into any business system. When marketing the service to healthcare organizations, Claude Paquin, CEO, suggested approaching CFOs, whose jobs typically involve seeking ways to cut costs and gain efficiencies. “However, one of our first sales was through an IT department,” he added. “It depends on who you are dealing with. CFOs are very dollars-and-cents oriented, and our solution can very quickly cut costs.”

Like Needham, Paquin said it is helpful to know a bit about an organization’s existing workflow before going in. “In [medical offices] and hospitals ... they have piles and piles of records they must keep, which are paper-based and need to be transferred into an electronic format,” he explained. “A lot of companies out there will scan records and basically archive. But with our technology, we actually rip the data out, if clients require that, and the data can then be used for any purpose, whether research, surveys or just general information.”

“Even handwritten data in a constrained form like a check box can be accurately captured, and lots of healthcare forms are designed that way,” offered Applied Docs VP of operations Keith Trafford. “But if [the data is] machine generated—no matter where it is on a document—we can grab anything [the customer] want[s].”

Trafford said this is where the intelligence is going forward, at the front end of the cycle as documents are being processed. “The first step is analyzing what the system is seeing. For instance, if details are needed fairly rapidly from more critical documents, then you would want to do further content extraction to capture the meta data, which is key reference information [that] help[s] users in their search and retrieval patterns,” he explained. “And, if there is extensive content [users] want to repurpose into a primary system, then we can go in even further on the forms.”

In diagnosing healthcare customers’ workflow challenges distributors will have to look at software solutions to find a treatment plan that works. “The goal is to ‘productize’ the offering, rather than sell technology,” concluded Paquin. “Big companies such as Microsoft ... are famous for taking technology and turning it into a product. End-users are not as interested in the plumbing as they are in knowing there is water coming out of the faucet. They just want the tools and the results.”