A large medical group, located in Connecticut, is the physician group associated with a hospital client of Vee Healthtek for facility coding. Through a referral from the hospital, the Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for the medical group reached out to Vee Healthtek for solutions to resolve issues faced by the organization.
The medical group receives electronic medical reports directly into their Electronic Health Record (EHR) system from several outside labs and radiology testing facilities. Although these facility reports should have been available in the system, they were not always linked to the appropriate patient or were not correctly matched with the order located in the system. Because electronic results from outside facilities often contain different identification codes, there were frequent mismatches with the original order. This discrepancy created orders that were not closed in the system.
A bidirectional interface was only available between the medical group and the hospital. Creating a bidirectional interface between the medical group SHMG and their associated labs and diagnostic imaging vendors would allow for more frequent matching of results with orders.
An additional issue involved the handling of manual uploads of reports. Reports received via fax or mail required scanning by the physician’s front desk staff and linked to the respective patient in the practice management system. Simultaneously, open orders from respective reports were required to be closed in the system. Due to lack of training and information, these reports were being scanned and loaded to the patient account, although they may not have been attached to the corresponding orders. This created orders that remained open in the system, although receipt of a report advised otherwise.
The issues described above caused there to be over one million orders in the medical group EMR which had not been matched to results and had not been closed.
Vee Healthtek collaborated to ensure the right skillset was available to correct the client’s concerns and 10 full-time employees were employed to begin the clean-up effort.
Initial training was conducted, and Vee Healthtek was instructed on how to search the various systems to attempt to match open orders and test results with patient records. After the first batch completion, the team realized that in some cases, testing may be described somewhat differently. For example, the true order may have been for a chest x-ray but the test result was for a CT lung, CT abdomen or MRI pelvis, etc. This discrepancy created a much lower than expected result accuracy. After identifying this issue, additional training was conducted and the process was modified to allow for additional resources.
After retraining and process adjustment, the results from the second batch of tests were much more accurate. Based on these improvements, the client continues to collaborate with Vee Healthtek to clear out up to one million open orders in the EMR system, as noted in the Production Plan chart listed below:
Vee Healthtek’s flexibility and creativity allowed for a customized solution to help the medical group resolve their problems. Vee Healthtek will be able to correct the issues faster and in a more cost-effective manner than could have otherwise been achieved.
For Vee Healthtek, success on this project cemented our relationship with the medical group and the hospital, and has positioned each organization for additional growth.
