Case Study

Community hospitalists

Delivering Unrivaled Care

As an early provider of hospitalist services, Community Hospitalists knows how to meet a hospital’s unique set of priorities. For more than 15 years, Community Hospitalists has provided a progressive, compassionate and experienced approach to inpatient care by recruiting and retaining exceptional physicians and then providing them with the resources to lead and deliver unrivaled care.

Because the group focuses narrowly on patient care, hospital efficiency and resource utilization, its tailored programs reduce healthcare costs yet remain dedicated to favorable patient outcomes and improved delivery of care. The team provides expert, inpatient medical care from admission to discharge by connecting with the patient’s primary care physician, emergency physicians and other hospital specialists.

The approximately 150 physicians at Community Hospitalists have been using MedAptus for web-based charge capture, management and analytics for over five years. The group had used a different charge capture application for a period of time but made the switch to MedAptus based upon the company’s seamless integration with Community Hospitalists’ practice management vendor/system, Allscripts.

Improving Billing Visibility

The physician-users at Community Hospitalists are predominantly hospitalists but there are also a number of surgeons, OBs, and pediatricians that use the software in addition to locum tenens providers. Clinicians document services rendered from patient care delivery across multiple Cleveland-area hospitals. Charges are entered into MedAptus via the web, hosted in the MedAptus data center, at the end of each provider shift. Patient and visit data is populated into MedAptus via nine inbound interfaces from systems that include IntraNexus, McKesson (Series and STAR), Siemens, Cerner, MEDITECH, Epic and Cerner (Millennium). Entered charges are reconciled against patient census’ to ensure full capture of opportunities; once all charges are reviewed, they are processed through to the Allscripts billing system.

As for gaining user acceptance of MedAptus, Community Hospitalists has a 100% adoption rate because the group mandates usage. The organization also ties a part of physician compensation to RVU productivity and that has helped providers become more accepting of the electronic tool. When it comes to timeliness of submission, if an expected charge is missing by 10 AM the morning following a patient encounter, the doctor is contacted.

After the group’s all-at-once deployment, users reported that MedAptus was easy to use. Community Hospitalists continuously brings new doctors into its growing group and their reaction to learning and using MedAptus’ electronic capability is largely positive given how intuitive the system’s navigation is. All new users are given a one hour training session before their first shift. They then hold on entering their charges until someone can sit with them to go over the charge entry within the system. Follow-up training to the newer users is given 2-3 weeks later.

User Feedback

In terms of end-user feedback about their MedAptus experience, Community Hospitalists’ physicians say they like being able to see what happened the day before, particularly after a shift or patient handoff. The doctors also appreciate the configurable filters to assist with data review, visual cues that indicate charge status and the ability to complete PQRS seamlessly at the point-of-care. The group’s administration appreciates the system’s ability to check for errors, apply custom rules and display the relationship between charges – all of this helps streamline the steps of the complex medical revenue cycle and ensure maximal reimbursement even during times of change, from the implementation of ICD-10 to the on-boarding of new providers.

While Community Hospitalists has not undertaken any formal study of the ROI MedAptus adoption has generated, the group believes that the improvement in charge capture is at about 15%. They also believe denials have decreased as a result of pro-active charge editing via the robust MedAptus compliance engine.

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