Data, payment concerns spark system purchase
Improving data integrity, ensuring reimbursement, and enhancing customer service were the goals Bon Secours Health System had in mind when it selected an enterprisewide scheduling system for its five hospitals in the Richmond, VA, area, says Robb Moss, administrative director of access services.
"Our plan is that not only will patients be scheduled, they also will be preregistered, which will improve our preregistration percentage and ensure we have all the appropriate data and insurance verified," he says. "We'll start getting precerts and authorizations."
One hospital has a patient-focused care environment with no admitting department. Having administrative associates who are responsible for other duties perform access functions has caused data integrity to suffer, he adds. "We're hoping that having centralized scheduling will improve this. Our schedulers have been trained in the latest changes in managed care contracts and HMOs."
So far, two of the five hospitals - Richmond Memorial Hospital and Memorial Regional Medical Center - have gone live with Encom pass, a scheduling product from Tempus Software in Jacksonville, FL. After looking at three systems, Moss says, Bon Secours chose Encompass, a Microsoft Windows-based system, because it was the most user-friendly and flexible. "We are able to take their `vanilla' package and do some modifications to the software that fit our purpose," he says. "Some of the others did not allow us to do that."
Scheduling with the new system "appears to be flowing nicely," Moss says, with both facilities getting a computerized list of scheduled appointments daily instead of the former array of handwritten appointments from each department. The four schedulers, one from manual radiology scheduling and the others from patient access positions, are based at Memorial Regional.
The few bugs to be worked out, he says, have to do with departments coming back and adjusting the protocols they devised, not with any software glitches.
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