Last year, the National Academy of Medicine estimated that excessive and unnecessary medical tests waste at least $200 billion a year in the United States. The same report estimated that, in addition to the monetary costs, the mistakes resulting from unnecessary tests and treatments can lead to 30,000 deaths annually.
No healthcare organization wants to write wasteful and unnecessary medical orders — they’re bad for patients and for business. Unfortunately, given the fact that so many providers might be submitting and fulfilling orders for one patient, finding a way to organize a patient’s treatment schedule in the most effective and efficient way can be difficult. For many healthcare organizations, however, Experian Health can provide a solution: Order Manager, a web-based platform for tracking treatment orders.
Order Manager in action
Experian Health’s Order Manager is a component of its comprehensive eCare NEXT® suite of healthcare workflow solutions. Order Manager facilitates communication between every player in a patient’s course of care — hospitals and health systems, standalone clinics, community physicians, and even testing facilities can all verify or update a patient’s testing and treatment schedules when necessary.
Order Manager integrates data into a patient’s electronic medical record so all supplementing data or documents he or she accumulates are captured and organized within a centralized interface that has actionable suggestions. The all-in-one platform gives providers a GPS-like ability to track an order until it’s completed, and every provider in the patient’s circle of care can see what tests have been ordered, what medications have been prescribed, and what the results have been. With Order Manager, staffers don’t have to manually place orders or call the patient’s original hospital or doctor to verify prior authorizations — no more duplication, no more conflicting and dangerous treatment plans, and no more confusion.
When ordering systems aren’t automated, it doesn’t just affect patient care; the labs that fulfill the orders are getting squeezed by inefficiencies, too. For Aegis Sciences Corporation, a leader in healthcare and forensic laboratory sciences, Experian Health’s Order Manager helped optimize order processes as efficiently as it has for hospitals.
Aegis Sciences wanted to provide staff members with the tools they need to consistently provide a positive experience to patients and the physicians they work with, and Order Manager has been an important tool in helping the company do so. The web-based platform improved efficiency and reduced costs by transforming operations into fully paperless processes.
Healthcare staff at Aegis Sciences said Order Manager was key in supporting the quality of the organization’s work, particularly the processes that require certain authorizations to be completed before tests can be ordered. With the help of Order Manger, Aegis Sciences was able to reduce the time spent on tasks such as accessioning — the arduous process of logging and sorting a sample in a larger data collection — to less than a minute.
In fact, according to Aegis Sciences: “Experian Health’s Order Manager teams were key in helping us realize our vision of a fully paperless process that could improve our workflows and processes to keep pace with our exceptional growth. We’re now able to offer a fully paperless process to our clients and require that certain fields, such as demographics and diagnosis codes, be completed on the front end.”
Client satisfaction at Aegis Sciences has risen thanks to a 27 percent reduction in errors and necessary follow-ups, as well as a 76 percent drop in attestation statements during the verification process.
To learn how Experian Health’s Order Manager can help your organization improve the quality of care for your patients and consumers, feel free to contact us today. Our team can assess the role that Order Manager could play in your organization’s workflow and help you implement it in the most efficient way.
To read more about Ageis Sciences’ experience, download this case study.
