.FLYINGHEAD KEEPING SCORE ON MOBILE SOLUTIONS
.TITLE Mobile healthcare: Caregivers on the go!
.AUTHOR Dale Troppito and Dawna Paton
.SUMMARY The cost of healthcare is on the rise, and over 25% of U.S. citizens can’t afford healthcare coverage. Insurance companies and healthcare providers are looking for new ways to dramatically lower the cost of care while improving the overall quality of care. This month’s column focuses on two growing mobile solutions for the healthcare provider: mobile rounding and mobile charge capture.
.DEPT
With the recent U.S. presidential platforms still fresh in our minds, you’ll recall there was a consensus on at least one point: U.S. healthcare is in crisis. The cost of healthcare is on the rise, and over 25% of U.S. citizens can’t afford healthcare coverage. Health insurance firms (i.e., payers), and hospitals and physicians (i.e. providers), agree the business of healthcare must change. Both payers and providers are looking for new ways to dramatically lower the cost of care, while improving the overall quality of care. Sounds ambitious, doesn’t it? Well, technology is proving to be a critical lynchpin in the healthcare sector’s success at meeting these objectives.
This month’s column focuses on two growing mobile solutions for the provider sector: mobile rounding and mobile charge capture. These applications are the perfect companion for the physician who is on the go! Hospitals are truly going mobile, installing highly-secure, wireless, private LANs. What’s the motivation? It’s simple, read on…
.H1 Motivation for mobile
The healthcare sector–payers and providers alike–are information generating machines. And more so than other types of business, these organizations must archive this patient data for a long time in order to meet regulatory storage requirements and lower the risk of liabilities. Providers must have complete, detailed, and accurate records of all health events and responses to those events.
There are a few serious problems to solve. First, there’s the problem of making sure all the data gets into the hospital’s central information system. With doctors, clinicians, and nurses running from patient to patient, patient data–and hospital services data–simply fails to be captured consistently.
.BREAK_EMAIL You’ll have to tap here to learn more about the cost-savings of mobile healthcare solutions.
Secondly, there’s the problem of efficiency. Care providers need to have all the patient data at hand in order to determine the next appropriate action in the care plan. Lab data, test results, prescription history, etc. must be available for review in tandem. And, often it isn’t.
This means that the data must be manually collected and compiled prior to making an assessment or diagnosis. This takes time and lowers the overall productivity of everyone in the caregiver chain.
Finally, there’s the problem of data accuracy. Forms, sheets of paper, and pencils don’t check the data as it’s committed to the record. Furthermore, the written patient data has to be transcribed for electronic capture in the central information system. Lack of data validation and structured data entry create the opportunity for incomplete and erroneous data. Even more data errors can crop up during data reentry as health information is transcribed from the handwritten paper form to the electronic entry for the central repository.
Mobile computing–including both handhelds and tablet PCs–is proving to be a panacea to all three of these problems because:
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.STEP Caregivers are more likely to enter data at the point and time of care when they have a mobile device. Data entry can occur any time and anywhere, without incurring delays.
.STEP Caregivers have complete access to all patient data. They’re immediately tapped into the patient’s lab reports, test results, prescription history, allergies, health history, care plan, vitals, and other caregivers’ notes. The handheld device is the caregiver’s mobile portal into all hospital functions. Caregivers are more productive and have more time to spend with patients. And this leads to more revenue.
.STEP Caregiver data is captured only once and only in electronic form. Data is validated upon entry. The problems of reading a physician’s handwriting or making a data entry mistake are totally avoided. Medical errors are reduced, and so is associated liability and risk.
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First, caregivers are more likely to enter data at the point and time of care when they have a mobile device. Data entry can occur any time and anywhere, without incurring delays.
Second, caregivers have complete access to all patient data. They’re immediately tapped into the patient’s lab reports, test results, prescription history, allergies, health history, care plan, vitals, and other caregivers’ notes. The handheld device is the caregiver’s mobile portal into all hospital functions. Caregivers are more productive and have more time to spend with patients. And this leads to more revenue.
Finally, caregiver data is captured only once, and only in electronic form. Data is validated upon entry. The problems of reading a physician’s handwriting or making a data entry mistake are totally avoided. Medical errors are reduced, and so is associated liability and risk.
.H1 Mobile rounding
Ok, so now you can totally relate to this mobile solution. Let me set the scene. You’re at your physician’s office. You see the wall of paper. You witness the clip charts and the manila folders–one with your name on it. You’re feeling like a needle in a haystack.
You sit patiently while your test results are fetched. You may even be wondering just how the office keeps it all straight. Later, you may even find yourself spending time with your healthcare insurance company trying to clear up erroneous charges for services and procedures that you can’t ever remember having been administered.
Mobile rounding brings the medical chart, and every functional group within the affiliated hospital, to the handheld device. Mobile solutions, like Mercury MD Mdata, are the next generation information technology that will transform the business processes of hospitals, clinics, and physician groups. Caregivers literally wirelessly tap into all the existing information infrastructure of the hospital, giving them faster access to the information they need to treat their patients.
The net bottom-line result is improved clinical workflow and caregiver efficiency. More patients are treated and the rate of medical error is reduced.
.H1 Mobile charge capture
Caregivers work at a frenetic pace and on an interrupt basis. It’s easy to understand that a physician or clinician can simply forget to submit the charge code for every performed medical service, procedure, and encounter. Often the caregiver fills out the encounter forms at the end of day, relying on memory recall of the day’s events; this of course promotes errors. And then the completed paper encounter form might be lost entirely! Hospitals lose millions of dollars every year as a result of medical service charges simply not being recorded or entered with inappropriate service codes.
There’s a more complex story to tell as well. Until the advent of mobile devices, charge capture was a manual, paper-based process. The claims department’s first challenge is to receive the charges from the caregivers. These charges are transformed into a claim, which is filed with the payer (i.e. health insurance firm) for reimbursement. If the submitted claim has errors or missing information, it’s rejected for payment and returned to the hospital for correction and resubmission.
Hospitals continually combat the problem of lag time between the medical service being performed by the caregiver, and their claims department receiving appropriate posting of the charge. Hospitals have a finite time window to submit/receive claims for reimbursement, and the clock begins ticking at the date the service is performed.
If an accurate, "clean", claim for the service isn’t received by the payer (i.e., health insurance firm) within this window, reimbursement is denied. This adds up to a lot of lost revenue every year that the hospital must write off! In addition, receipt of reimbursement charges are delayed in posting to accounts receivable due to tie-ups in data correction and validation.
A key objective of hospitals today is to capture every charge, receive reimbursement on every charge, and receive reimbursement quickly. Sounds simple, but it’s not.
In order to make this truly a reality, the charges need to be captured at the point and time of care. Charge data input must be guided and validated to ensure accuracy and prompt appropriately for on-the-fly correction. Once captured, the data must be sent immediately to the claims department so a reimbursement can be filed. This is where mobile devices come in, and indeed they’re a perfect fit.
Finally, there’s the administrative burden of the processing and re-processing erroneous claims. If caregiver charges and payer claims are completed accurately the first time, there’s less administrative work and a net cost savings in administrative staff overall.
.H1 In conclusion
Mobile devices are a perfect shoe-fit for helping healthcare providers meet their cost savings and quality of care goals. Since most hospital infrastructures rely upon a centralized data repository that’s fed from every department, it’s easy to add a layer of mobile computing to caregivers. Doing so will enable them to have a more informed view of their patients, and encourage prompt and accurate recording of service charges. The bottom line is more generated revenue, less lost revenue, and lower operational costs for claims processing.
.H1 What’s on the docket for next month?
For our next column, we’re doing something a bit different. We’ll be conducting an interview with a leading mobile solution provider from the healthcare industry. The interview will probe how they designed their solution to maximize payback for healthcare providers.
While we thoroughly enjoy pontificating on our personally selected topics regarding Mobile Enterprise Solutions, we’d like to establish an interactive relationship with our reading audience. Monologues are not us! We’d like to invite you to send your questions, opinions, and topic suggestions on mobile enterprise solution value delivery to dtroppito@computingunplugged.com. We’ll do our very best to respond expeditiously in our upcoming columns. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Mercury MD Mdata, visit http://www.mercurymd.com.
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