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All too often, hospitals and vendors want to accelerate the implementation of a new EHR solution, hoping to capitalize on the latest benefits as soon as possible. But a rushed EHR implementation can quickly work against a facility by creating friction among the hospital staff.
To reduce the chances an implementation will cause disruptions to care and operations, MEDHOST strives to gain an intimate understanding of organizational needs, especially in a community-based setting. We make it a point to sit down with our customers and adjust our implementation methodologies to address these unique challenges.
Our approach includes:
In this blog, we’ll unpack each of these strategies and show how they can help your facility to support modern care modalities without disrupting workflows.
No one likes having a bunch of guys with visitor badges working out of a supply closet.
Our centralized implementation command center, operating around the clock, ensures smooth coordination and communication between internal and external stakeholders without the need for excessive onsite personnel. This approach minimizes end-user impact, tracks progress, and facilitates efficient issue resolution, keeping hospital operations running seamlessly.
Most importantly, a strong command center speeds the escalation of any issues that may arise, ensuring quick and effective resolutions.
Clear communication is essential in any healthcare technology implementation. When working with a hometown provider or a smaller hospital, it’s especially important to get a lay of the land, have those crucial conversations, and understand the challenges these facilities face before plugging in a new system.
During the pandemic, we demonstrated our agility and adaptability by adjusting our communication strategies to overcome limitations posed by in-person interactions and varying hospital quarantine policies. This flexibility allowed us to continue supporting implementations and patient care while ensuring everyone's safety.
In community-based hospitals, financial and clinical parties often have conflicting priorities that can impede progress. Our implementations experts, equipped with hands-on experience, foster collaboration and empathetically prioritize requests and deliverables. By providing 24/7 access to subject matter experts, we enable efficient change management and issue resolution, facilitating forward momentum without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Ready to experience an EHR that works for your care community?
Learn more about how the MEDHOST implementations team can set you up for continued success. Email us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
Mille Lacs Health System (MLHS), a community-owned, not-for-profit healthcare organization, is situated approximately 80 miles north of the Twin Cities in central Minnesota. It serves a predominately rural population within Mille Lacs and surrounding counties, as well as residents of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe.
The hospital is currently undergoing a multimillion-dollar renovation and expansion, including better inpatient rooms, a new emergency department, kitchen, cafeteria, lobby, same-day surgery, lab, sleep center, and more.
By integrating HIT systems through a collaborative partnership with MEDHOST, MLHS has consistently provided exceptional care to the people of Mille Lacs County and the surrounding area, despite undergoing rapid change.
Earlier this month, Ken Misch, president of MEDHOST, had the opportunity to interview Beth O’Connor, executive director of the Virginia Rural Health Association and president of the National Rural Health Association (NRHA).
In this two-part series, Ken and Beth discuss the developing nature of rural healthcare, some of its most pressing challenges, and how MEDHOST collaborates with rural health systems to continue serving their needs.
The first section of this article emphasizes the challenges of connectivity, population health management, and the impact of COVID-19.
Ken: Thank you for joining us today, Beth. Can you start by telling me a little about your current role and why you’re so passionate about rural health?
Beth: I’ve been the executive director of the Virginia Rural Health Association for the past seventeen years. Through that role, I became involved in the National Rural Health Association (NRHA), serving in several positions, including currently acting as the president of the board of trustees.
My passion for rural health comes from growing up in rural Minnesota, and being concerned about the welfare of my family, friends, and neighbors.
Ken: You've been a rural health advocate, as you said, for seventeen years. What kind of new challenges have you seen emerge in that time?
Beth: One is that technology has an increasing influence in our lives and in healthcare. It has become both a way to bridge the rural-urban gap and a contributor to that gap. We can use technology to provide better access to many healthcare services, but only where broadband is available.
For instance, I’m having this conversation from my office, partially because there is no way I could do it from my home.
The other is the concept of population health management. Public health researchers have learned that health outcomes have more to do with where you live than how you live. We can estimate someone's life expectancy based on their zip code.
The challenge is how to address those health inequities. The burden of doing so, for the most part, has been placed on local hospitals, which isn't something these facilities were ever designed to address.
Finding a way forward and addressing population health will be a big challenge for rural hospitals in the future.
Ken: COVID-19 changed the dynamic of our industry and highlighted several needs and wants; what would you say are the biggest lessons you have learned during the pandemic, particularly as it relates to rural healthcare?
Beth: Over the years, I have seen a decreasing level of trust in healthcare providers. Generations ago, the country doctor was an icon of the community. Now, we see people more willing to believe something they read from an unsubstantiated source on the internet than the advice of their primary care provider.
Covid taught us that mistrust in healthcare systems has very real consequences. Before, if someone didn't follow the advice of their doctor, it was their problem. But with an infectious disease, it becomes everyone's problem very quickly.
Ken: What is happening with telehealth in rural communities? COVID-19 seemed to cause a spike, but recent data indicates that it has dropped off significantly.
Beth: Restrictions on in-person care increased the use of telehealth. But more importantly, so did removing the regulations on using telehealth. Congress put in place several provisions that increased the ability of rural providers to serve their patients in a virtual setting.
Unfortunately, those provisions were temporary and will be lifted as soon as the public health emergency has been declared over.
What we need Congress to do at this point is pass legislation to reduce those barriers permanently. No one is going to invest time and resources in a program that could have its reimbursement ended at any minute.
Ken: Do some providers view telehealth as a new form of competition?
Beth: Yes and no.
It would very much depend on the provider. A rural primary care provider most likely isn’t going to be replaced by telehealth. But a rural specialist—maybe so.
In truth, we already have so few specialists in rural communities, I don’t think that’s a serious consideration at this time.
Ken: Workforce development in rural healthcare, including healthcare IT experts, has emerged as a critical challenge during the pandemic. What are some of the biggest callouts that you see arising from that, and how do you think they should be resolved?
Beth: Covid has really brought to light the lack of every healthcare position, whether that’s nurses, phlebotomists, or IT staff.
Looking at what we can do to address that in the future, I see two things:
One, make the cost of receiving an education more manageable. When I attended the International Rural Health Conference in June, the question I was asked most often by people from other countries was “is it true that students go into huge debt in the United States?”
We must find a way to address student loan debt to make sure people can get a quality education without going thousands of dollars in debt.
Two, we need to improve our working environment. Too often employees are treated as interchangeable parts instead of valuable individuals. The percentage of pupils that go into nursing school but leave the field in less than five years is, frankly, a national source of embarrassment.
Until we treat people with respect and pay them in an equitable manner, nothing will change.
Stay Tuned for Part II, where Ken and Beth will touch on social determinants of health, interoperability, the ongoing crisis of rural hospital closure and more.
To hear more of Beth’s insights on rural health advocacy, check out her contribution to Misinformation, and Making Do: Appalachian Health-Care Workers and the COVID-19 Pandemic, an upcoming collection from Ohio University Press.
As a partner of the NRHA, MEDHOST is pleased to contribute to the sustainability of healthcare in rural America. Please contact us at inquiries@medhost.com or call 1.800.383.6278 to learn more about the numerous ways MEDHOST helps address difficulties in both rural and community hospital settings.
The community hospital plays a crucial dual role for the population it serves.
In addition to acting as centers for accessible health, community hospitals provide access to well-paid, skilled jobs and are a factor in attracting businesses to their area.
While the pandemic confirmed community hospitals’ critical role in patient care, at the same time, it often stressed economic viability. Under such taxing circumstances, it became even more essential to ensure community hospitals captured every dollar of revenue. Even still, on the downward slope of the pandemic, collecting complete and accurate payments remains an ongoing challenge for many facilities.
When payments and profitability are consistently below standards, one of the first places community hospitals should look is their revenue cycle management (RCM) process. For community hospitals already short on resources, it can be challenging to pinpoint RCM areas that need the most attention. In these cases, help from a third party is a practical solution to identifying and resolving potential RCM issues.
Billing regulations and reimbursement rates are constantly changing in healthcare. Often with change comes confusion. Confusion in your business office can easily lead to billing errors or ill-advised RCM shortcuts. It is also important to point out hospitals’ claims denial rates have increased over the past several years and denials have reached new highs. Some of the top reasons for claim rejections and denials is due to medical necessity, coding errors, and claims filed too late due to lack of patient information along with authorization to provide services.
RCM issues spanning from contract management to self-pay patient collections can lead to:
Significant losses can accumulate over time, and flawed processes become entrenched.
In addition, RCM processors are highly skilled professionals. Hiring experienced RCM staff is frequently problematic in non-urban or remote communities. Even if a community hospital can find suitable candidates, consistent patient billing issues can make hiring, training, retaining, and motivating those professionals even more difficult. Staffing issues can also lead to billing errors, which, when coupled with extended claim resolutions, result in patient dissatisfaction and a poor community image.
A third-party RCM provider can support both the human and technology elements by acting as an extension of that hospital’s business office team. Bringing in additional expertise also helps your business staff:
MEDHOST offers scalable RCM outsourcing solutions utilized by many of its community hospital customers. These services are managed by healthcare professionals with role-based RCM experience. Providing oversight and guidance, our team helps drive RCM best practices to optimize the hospital’s revenue cycle, which is essential to maintaining both operations and the hospital's critical role as a pillar to their community.
The MEDHOST Revenue Cycle Services staff collaborates closely with facility management. This collaboration and accountability include regular meetings for long-term planning, as well as providing weekly and monthly reports.
From staff workloads to accounts receivable, MEDHOST’s Revenue Cycle Services can make a significant difference in a community hospital’s ability to operate efficiently, maintain a positive community image, and improve the patient financial experience.
The added support gives financial operations stakeholders, like the business office manager and CFO, more autonomy. This level of self-sufficiency can be priceless in community hospital business offices. With a partner to help manage many of the day-to-day tasks of hospital billing operations, business office managers can find more time to train staff and improve customer service.
To learn more about MEDHOST Revenue Cycle Services and Solutions, email us at inquiries@MEDHOST.com or call 1.800.383.6278.
The Texas based health system has extended its partnership to include its new behavioral health facility
FRANKLIN, Tenn., August 25, 2020 – A Texas-based health system, Carrus Health, and MEDHOST, a leading EHR (electronic health record) and healthcare IT solutions provider, recently completed the implementation of MEDHOST solutions at Carrus Health’s new behavioral hospital. The MEDHOST solutions are intended to boost the hospital’s clinical and financial performance and provide stability to the facility’s IT environment. Carrus Health System will utilize MEDHOST’s cloud-platform Enterprise EHR and Revenue Cycle Solutions at Carrus Behavioral Hospital, the latest addition to its group of hospitals.
MEDHOST partnered with Carrus Rehabilitation Hospital and Carrus Specialty Hospital (LTAC) prior to this recent implementation. Carrus attributes their ongoing partnership with MEDHSOST to its quality solutions, dedication to customer excellence, and exceptional service.
“I am very blessed with the opportunity to lead an amazing team which serves three hospitals located on our beautiful Sherman, Texas campus,” said Brad Sidlo, Hospital Administrator at Carrus Health. "All three of our Sherman hospitals utilize MEDHOST solutions and services. Having confidence in all aspects of your EHR solution is invaluable for us and critical to our ongoing success. From billing, to clinical care to reporting, MEDHOST helped guide us in a very organized manner from project kick off to completion. Beyond offering an optimal solution, it is evident MEDHOST wanted to exceed our expectations which we really respect and appreciate.”
“Despite a multitude of unforeseeable challenges during implementation, including construction delays and the COVID-19 pandemic, our collective teams at MEDHOST and Carrus Health were resilient, highly collaborative, and effectively communicative in a timely manner,” Brad Sidlo added. “We all had to be very flexible, but I think that says a lot about both of our organizations’ sincere mission to put patients first.”
“At MEDHOST, it is all about how we support hospitals with the solutions and services that enable them to fully focus on what they do best — provide excellent patient care even during these unprecedented times” said Bill Anderson, Chairman and CEO at MEDHOST. “Working with dedicated and focused health systems like Carrus Health is a privilege, and we look forward to our expanded partnership with Carrus Health as we continue to support their commitment to excellence.”
About MEDHOST
MEDHOST has been providing products and services to healthcare facilities of all types and sizes for over 35 years. Today, more than 1,000 healthcare facilities are partnering with MEDHOST and enhancing their patient care and operational excellence with its clinical and financial solutions, which include an integrated EHR solution. MEDHOST also offers a comprehensive emergency department information system with business and reporting tools. Additionally, its unparalleled support and cloud platform solutions make it easy to focus on what’s important for healthcare facilities: their patients and business. Connect with MEDHOST on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Contact:
Samra Khan
Sr. Enterprise Brand Manager
615-761-1000, ext. 2119
Samra.khan@medhost.com
Ken Misch, President and Chief Financial Officer of MEDHOST was interviewed by Senator Bill Frist on his healthcare podcast, A Second Opinion. A Second Opinion connects healthcare leaders and innovators around trends in the healthcare industry and overall health in general.
In this episode, Ken shares his personal story of overcoming adversity and how his health journey feeds his passion for making healthcare and the patient experience better. He details how he had to take a different approach to managing his personal health and similarly how thinking outside the box can positively impact the ever-changing healthcare industry.
He also discusses how rural healthcare is changing and how MEDHOST works with rural health systems to continue to meet their evolving needs. While rural hospitals continue to operate as the backbone of their communities, he notes that it’s important they continue to grow and expand their services outside of the four walls of their facilities.
Tim Putnam, who serves as the President and CEO of Margaret Mary Health—a critical access hospital in Batesville, Indiana—and also a President of National Rural Health Association (NRHA), shares his perspective on the state of rural healthcare in America as well as his take on creating payment models best suited for population health management in rural communities.
Putnam shares unique solutions he's developed for growing his community’s rural healthcare workforce, as well as tips for fighting the opioid epidemic, and his thoughts on what legislators can do to help sustain rural healthcare and empower rural providers.
Health IT on the Record, presented by MEDHOST, explores how innovations in health information technology impact every aspect of a health system, from multi-hospital networks down to individual patients.
Subscribe now and get access to more MEDHOST “Health IT on the Record” episodes.
