HOSPITAL WORKFLOW & REPORTING
Hospitals have implemented sophisticated Electronic Medical Record (EMR) software systems that have the ability to manage patient records, clinical operations, revenue cycle, and more. Due to the customization and configuration that is involved in each department, these systems take months if not years to implement and, even then, are constantly being tweaked to meet new requirements.
Challenge
SALIX had been providing scanning and data entry services for this hospital for years. During our semi-annual review with the client, we discussed other workflow challenges that they were struggling to address. They shared the fact that hospital leadership had communicated new expectations for their department that would require them to process all incoming transactions within 24 hours of receipt. Their current processing time was over 72 hours and their budget was limited, so the option of significantly increasing staff was not viable.
Solution
SALIX’s workflow team spent an afternoon with hospital management to learn their processes, identify bottlenecks, and discuss inefficiencies with the individuals that were processing the daily volumes. Based on their feedback, SALIX developed a prototype workflow solution that would allow for the removal of redundant data entry, transparency of where each item existed in the workflow, notifications if the service levels were at risk of not being met, and a dashboard for leadership to be
able to review real-time results.
The demo included representatives from the hospital’s EMR implementation team who explained that the EMR system would be able to provide similar capabilities as those shown by SALIX. Unfortunately, it would take them a minimum of 18 months before it would be fully operational based on their current workload and competing priorities. SALIX, however, was able to implement the solution within 10 days.
Benefits to Client
Since the time of implementation of SALIX’s workflow solution over 5 years ago, the department has consistently met its internal processing expectations. Without SALIX’s solution, the hospital would have been forced to almost triple its staff to meet the increased turnaround time expectations based on their original productivity. Instead, SALIX’s solution cost them less than one new entry-level employee.
Another benefit was the speed of the design, testing, and implementation of the solution. It took less time for the workflow solution to be fully functional then it takes for the department to train a new employee.
Added Benefit
During SALIX’s workflow team’s evaluation, they uncovered a manual reporting process that was extremely time-intensive. Even though the hospital had implemented a new EMR system, there were 4 legacy systems that were still active. To be able to provide leadership with all the required data, they had a team of three people that would regularly export data to Excel, manually format the reports, and then review the combined data to determine if there were any outliers that needed to be investigated.
SALIX was able to fully automate that process, so now, with the click of a button, the data is automatically
imported from multiple systems, formatted, and an exception queue is created and worked by one person. This solution has not only reduced costs significantly but also improved the accuracy and timeliness of their data.