Don’t Assume Your Current, Multi-million dollar systems are making it easier for your staff to find and make positive change with documentation/billing/inventory management.
In over 20 years marketing to and consulting with hospital administrators and managers, I’ve learned two things: 1) Hospital decision makers are smart; they have a vision, but their culture and current systems make more rapid change challenging; and, 2) Many Hospital decision makers are frustrated at how long it takes to get drill-down-able, accurate information to help make decisions.
I recently had a hospital CFO comment, “we just spent 8 figures on our new XXX (HIS) System that took 18 months to install, and it is amazing what information I ask for but it can’t seem to provide! It feels like we just got a new electronic filing cabinet.”
Doctors increasingly ask for data on their usage by procedure compared to their peers within a hospital, but many hospitals cannot provide it as it, so they use paid services that provide aggregate baseline data only. In other words, you pay for knowing that you were high or low compared to “like hospitals/providers”, but don’t know why, or where to go to improve it. Worse, many paid services provide data as much as 6 months old. A busy doctor can barely recall what he/she used on a procedure 2 days ago, let alone 2 months ago. No wonder many Doctors balk at endorsing changes in device/item usage when they cannot see recent data (or their own data)!
In the land of 8-figure HIS systems for documentation and billing, plus 7 figure dollar inventory systems, why is it so hard to even identify useable information for improvement?
It continually amazes me when we ask in discovery for simple items like: “What was your total value of product expirations last year?”
“Well, we know it happens but we don’t’ track it (but we have people that watch it).”
“Okay, let’s look at billing. Can you provide, for these procedure codes, the itemized charges for each patient (depersonalized, of course) in a useable format (like excel)”
(2 months later) “Well, we tried, but it is really time-consuming and we don’t’ know if we can put our hands on that (but we have people that review that).”
More recently, I had two hospitals discover that, true, their Cath Lab Systems integrated with their EPIC System, but the “integration” was comprised (for device/item usage) of scanned “images” of documents on what was used in a procedure. In other words, any analyzing would require scrolling through and fully reading each page (like files in a cabinet).
Don’t forget also that the “capture device” for most of those 8-figure systems are: human typing, stickers, printed forms (requiring more human typing), or bar coding (we call it the honor system).
This is why it is gratifying to provide with Mobile Aspects a tool that: a) integrates into the care process so that the taking of an item automates the documenting of it, and b) that information is available, exportable, granular and available to decision makers that day. That means I get to help those smart decision makers move faster and allow staff to make changes that impact operations and finances.