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Accurate information at all levels and for every stakeholder is of top importance at any health care organization. Being able to access pertinent financial documents and related information is essential. The organization must be able to retrieve data and use that information to make important decisions at all levels of the health system, and having leaders who have their finger on the pulse of the organization's financial health is key to operating efficiently.
Saint Clare's Health System, a 500-bed health system with four separate hospital sites and 20 different locations, a member of Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) in Denville, N.J., meets these challenges by providing real-time data on a patient's registration status, health information and other important data within a secure environment.
Richard S. Temple, vice president of IT/CIO at Saint Clare's, said during a recent interview with his team that the ability to take disparate data sources and dig into the information was important in their decision to partner with a technology vendor. Through work with DB Technology, Saint Clare's can store and distribute critical data with a single solution that eliminated redundancies.
"By being able to take data and cumulative historical, we have a very powerful tool at our fingertips," Temple said. "We're able to take late charges -- which are not insignificant - and through the Report Automation System [RAS] automatically e-mail reports to people. We're automatically reducing late charges, leading to aggressive ROI."
Streamlined workflow
RAS is helping Saint Clare's effectively maximize its revenues while streamlining its workflow automation processes and eliminating paper. In addition, the health system has seen a reduction in its paper costs, because most reports are e-mailed and no longer printed on paper. Printed reports come directly from the RAS server print queue.
Hardcopy reports that were generated from nightly processing, for example, used to eat up several boxes of paper each day. "We have no boxes now," Temple noted.
Personnel costs have dropped, too, Temple said, because couriers no longer have to deliver various reports to the nursing units. Every report is either sent automatically via e-mail or displayed on-line through the RAS viewing tool.
The newest version of Clark, N.J.-based DB Technology's software, RAS 3.28, is deployed across hundreds of hospitals and health systems nationwide. RAS addresses the financial and operational information capture and report distribution needs of hospitals, such as Saint Clare's, and spans patient registration to remittance.
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From left to right: Tero Caamano, Rich Temple,
Steve Rogacki |
"The decision to move from a paper-centric environment to an electronic one is rapidly taking hold in health care," DB Technology President and CEO David Wechsler said in a statement. "Saint Clare's is curtailing the growing cost of health care administration. By utilizing our RAS platform, the endless stream of paper that plagues the industry - too many documents on too many different computer platforms across too many departments - is now simplified."
Where there once was paper, there is no more. In what Temple and his staff jokingly described as a "potato cellar where we would store binders," the reams of paper that filled those binders have been replaced by electronic forms. Paper forms, from those in patient registration, accounting and other back-office processes and functions, as well as across hospital departments including human resources and in the emergency department, have given way to electronic reports.
In addition to all of the upfront benefits of eliminating paper, RAS gives Saint Clare's the ability to manipulate data for reporting, including data from its CernerMillennium clinical information system for clinical information, its McKesson system for patient billing and ADT, and its PeopleSoft system for human resources. RAS even embeds the Monarch data extraction business intelligence reporting tool to provide further benefits because all of the information is readily available for data mining.
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