Tag: eCare NEXT

Making phone calls, filling out paperwork, and chasing down debt shouldn’t take up the bulk of a healthcare organization’s daily schedule. Now more than ever, physicians have little time to provide high-quality care to their patients. In 2015, the American College of Physicians (ACP) put forth the Patients Before Paperwork initiative to address the burdens that these administrative tasks create for physicians and their staff. The ACP states that defining and mitigating administrative tasks is essential to improve an organization’s workflow and reduce physician burnout. Through utilizing healthcare workflow automation, you can improve productivity without overextending employees' duties. Instead, your team can spend more time caring for patients and helping them with the financial side of their experience, which is something both patients and doctors prefer. Easier access with automated healthcare solutions In the new wave of consumerism, there is a high demand for convenience and transparency in every transaction. Healthcare providers and organizations also face this pressure, but the industry has been slower to transform because patient care transactions are infinitely more complicated than online retail purchases. Despite the slow go, healthcare workflow automation technology and organizations are starting to catch up. For example, engagement is a defining factor for today’s healthcare consumers. However, engagement must be mindfully catered to specific situations. When it comes to scheduling appointments, patients actually prefer an automated healthcare workflow approach over talking to a human. Regardless of its form, engagement is still essential in all aspects of the care continuum, and physicians can find it hard to engage when every administrative task has to be completed by hand. If you’re still devoting time and resources to manual patient access tasks, you're not only falling behind in the competitive healthcare industry, but you’re also missing an opportunity to enhance the overall patient experience. Fortunately, countless tasks — scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions — are no longer paper-based and don’t require nearly as much hands-on involvement as they used to. Given this reality, automated healthcare solutions can and should take are of scheduling and other mundane tasks. Ultimately, automation will allow administrative employees to focus on other areas of engagement, like financial counseling for patients. Employees will have more time to help patients understand their financial obligations and perhaps set up a payment plan before procedures, avoiding the sticker shock of a surprise bill months later. The touchless approach In the Patients Before Paperwork initiative mentioned above, the ACP concluded that “excessive administrative tasks have serious adverse consequences for physicians and their patients.” At Experian Health, our automated healthcare solutions reduce those consequences by creating a touchless approach that only requires human intervention for exceptional cases. A touchless, automated healthcare workflow makes patient access predictable so you can spend more time serving patients. For example, our eCare NEXT® solution is a single platform that automates every step of the revenue cycle. Users only work on prescreened accounts with actionable follow-ups. Touchless Processing™ takes care of the rest through intelligent automation. You can effectively implement Touchless Processing throughout the rest of your organization by integrating eCare NEXT with Experian's other solutions: Registration QA When eCare NEXT is integrated with Registration QA, for instance, you can automatically access patients’ insurance eligibility in real time and identify registration inaccuracies early in the revenue cycle. This significantly reduces claims denials that can cut into revenue and take up more time to correct and resubmit. Payer-specific information can also be stored and automatically updated to ensure accuracy every time that payer comes up. Authorizations You can carry the touchless approach even further by expanding your suite of solutions with our Authorizations.The platform automates authorization management using the payer authorization requirements already stored and updated in the system. Authorization completes inquiries and submissions without user intervention to further reduce denials and expedite reimbursements. When done manually, administrative tasks related to orders, scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions are a drain on any healthcare organization’s resources. Minimizing staff involvement in these tasks improves the experience for physicians and patients alike, but it requires automated healthcare workflow solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into the workflow. With Experian Health’s Touchless Processing solutions, providers can exercise greater control over these tasks and significantly improve revenue recovery. This will give physicians and employees more time to focus on creating a more efficient, effective, and positive experience for everyone involved.

Challenge: a disconnected healthcare ecosystem Exchanging information across the healthcare ecosystem and achieving interoperability is a goal and challenge all healthcare organizations share. While regulations such as the Affordable Care Act introduced incentives and requirements to drive adoption of electronic medical records, they also highlighted a critical gap in healthcare – a universal patient identifier. Impact: Felt downstream across your enterprise The lack of a universal patient identifier, compounded by data integration challenges and the increasing fluidity of patient data, has created significant issues downstream – billing errors, redundant treatments and testing, HIPAA breaches, incorrect administration of treatments and prescriptions, and more. These issues contribute to the pool of preventable medical errors, which is currently the number three leading cause of death in the United States. Solution: Universal Identity Manager Experian Health’s Universal Identity Manager (UIM) accurately identifies patients and matches records within and across disparate healthcare entities, creating a universal patient identifier to facilitate information exchange. Drawing on more than 40 years of experience managing universal identifiers across various industries and leveraging Experian’s consumer demographic information, the UIM achieves higher match rates than traditional industry solutions. Integration flexibility The UIM is integrated within eCare NEXT®, but also supports various API options. It can also be leveraged in conjunction with biometric and traditional Enterprise Master Patient Index solutions. Batch: Receives, processes, and loads patient demographic information via patient data file. Starting with an initial historical patient data file in batch is recommended. The UIM algorithm is applied to accurately identify duplicate records and assign a Universal Patient Identifier (UPI) that can be used to facilitate information exchange across different healthcare entities. The UIM Batch is currently being offered at no charge to the entire healthcare industry. Duplicate Merge Tool: Provides a workflow tool to address duplicate patient records identified through the UIM batch. The Duplicate Merge Tool encompasses robust access and issue assignment management, configurable merge strategies, customizable search and filter capabilities, comprehensive audit trails, and postback or file output options. Search & Duplicate Medical Record Number (MRN) Alert: Leverages in process scripting to perform a real-time search the UIM as patient demographic information is being entered into an HIS during registration. The optimized patient record for each potential patient match is returned. If the search is circumvented, a Duplicate MRN alert will be created within eCare NEXT and prompt manual user review. Real-time search can also be facilitated through a direct API integration. Experian Single Best Record: Leverages an algorithm to look across all linked patient accounts that exist within a client’s enterprise database and aliases and addresses from Experian’s demographic information and returns back a patient’s single best record by demographic field. Data Analysis: Offers standard, premium, and custom reporting options with detailed data analysis across your patient data file. Learn more about Universal Identity Manager here, or contact your account representative for more information.

The title of Best in KLAS is a highly coveted recognition of outstanding efforts to help healthcare professionals deliver better patient care. It is reserved for vendor solutions that lead the software and services market segments with the broadest operational and clinical impact on healthcare organizations. ~KLAS Enterprises LLC Last month, Experian Health’s eCare NEXT® platform was awarded the highest score in the Patient Access category of the 2015/2016 Best in KLAS: Software & Services report. This is the 5th straight year Experian Health has received the highest ranking in the patient access category—3 years as Category Leader in Patient Access – Eligibility Checking and now 2 years Best in KLAS in the broader Patient Access category. The KLAS award confirms our strong commitment to continually provide advanced technology and revenue cycle products for our clients, and consistently develop enhancements and new solutions with them. We are proud of the collaboration between our progressive clients and our dedicated employees to ensure clients provide the best patient care experience, and achieve payment certainty for every patient. It’s a great honor that our clients continue to hold Experian Health’s solutions in such high regard that we have been recognized consistently by KLAS year after year. View Press Release View full list of Best in KLAS winners and Category Leaders