Cardiovascular Business - November/December 2008 - (Page 8)

COVER STORY Having the practice management software as a component of the EMR allows personnel to schedule tests and look at the results of those tests within the same dashboard. Source: NextGen Healthcare Information Systems measures to report, opting for measures five, six and eight. Measures five and eight are concerned with ejection fraction; measure six is antiplatelet therapy. Scott says they added a small corner to patient billing slips that physicians, on evaluation and management (E&M) encounters, would complete if the ejection fraction was under 40 percent or over 40 percent, or if they were on antiplatelet therapy based on a diagnosis code. By putting this on the billing slip at charge entry, the PM’s Rules Engine would pop up and prompt, based on the diagnosis and E&M code, the staff to input the additional related CPT codes for the claim to drop. According to Honeycutt, the challenge continues to be balancing the ROI that the practice has seen, with the financing of the software, to ensure they are getting the value necessary for physicians in an era where reimbursement is targeted to go down, year after year. “We need to make sure our docs are efficient and we need to be efficient in making sure that we get paid appropriately,” she concludes. Connecting billing & clinical systems Healthcare consumerism and transparency are bringing about an awareness of the need to adopt next-generation revenue-cycle systems, to have complete integration between revenue-cycle systems and clinical systems. › Practice Management Software Helps ■ Improve data management ■ Track patient flow ■ Find payor mismatches ■ Increase productivity ■ Minimize error ■ Connect billing ■ Minimize lost revenue ■ Maximize reimbursement intelligence ■ Increase business ■ Track pay-for- with clinical ■ Reduce performance metrics redundancy West Michigan Heart in Grand Rapids, Mich., chose a combined solution of PM and EMR software to provide the infrastructure to solve operations issues, quality maintenance and reporting issues and to assist with capacity management. PM software impacts the billing and registration and keeps track of who within the practice needs access to that information, according to Suzette Jaskie, CEO of West Michigan. From a capacity management scenario, many cardiology practices have ancillary services, such as stress tests or echoes. PM software allows ancillary services to be monitored and scheduled. By having access to the clinical information within the EMR, however, staff can not only schedule those, but also look at data resulting from those tests and the orders that might result from having the first test. Before deploying platform-independent, client-server PM capabilities integrated with EMR software from NextGen Healthcare Information Systems, West Michigan did not have this capability. Jaskie says they were spending time and money on people and systems to get the two sides of the business properly connected. NextGen’s PM component comes standard with the EMR package. Take the drug Coumadin for example. To effectively manage the patient taking the medication requires hands on management, from the get-go. Previously, Coumadin information on a patient existed in a separate database from the medical record. Every time staff needed something about that patient’s history or billing information related to Coumadin, they had to do a separate retrieval from the Coumadin database to manage care. They no longer have to do that. “From a quality perspective, we are managing data so much more appropriately, easily and accurately by using PM software with the EMR that we think we will see a greater impact on our operational effectiveness,” Jaskie says. There are three immediate ways in which West Michigan has seen an ROI by choosing PM software that is integrated with an EMR. The first is simply 8 Cardiovascular Business November/December 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Cardiovascular Business - November/December 2008

Cardiovascular Business - November/December 2008 Contents First Word Cover Story: Practice Management Software Moves Beyond Bean Counting The Death of CME as We Know It? Clinical Study Digets: Triple-Antiplatelet Therapy; Ex-Vioxx Users Beware Shockwaves Subside from the FDA's Echo Contract Warning Burning Question: Does Laser Heart Therapy for Angina Really Work? Advanced Visualization Adds New Practive Dimension Coronary Calcium Scoring Program Reaps Dividends Interventionalists Get Pumped Up About Mechanical Chest Compression Trials Force Physicians to Re-Examine Oral Anti-Diabetic Drug Protocols News & Views Calendar Reader Resources The ACC Corner

Cardiovascular Business - November/December 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.