Some surgery centers have turned to automated systems, such as SourcePlus Passport, to help reduce the number of manual processes.
Gina Espenschied, RN, administrator at the Surgery Center at Brinton Lake in Glen Mills, Pa., recently implemented SourcePlus Passport for her center’s perioperative workflow. This system allows patients at the ASC to complete registration and medical information online. It has decreased the time nurses spend on the phone calling patients, according to Ms. Espenschied.
“What we do is have patients go onto a HIPAA-compliant Web site and enter their demographic information in addition to information about their medical history,” says Ms. Espenschied. “If patients do not have access to a computer, we bring them to our office and have a computer available here for them.
“From my experience, patients that have liked the new system; they like having less paperwork,” says Ms. Espenschied. “It also reduces paperwork for the physician’s scheduler. The scheduler now simply gives the patient a card with the Web address of our secure site.”
Ms. Espenschied eventually hopes to have schedulers request patient e-mails so that they can be reminded about their need to complete the registration process.
Marjorie Romano, administrator of the CARES Surgicenter, a member of Saint Peter’s Healthcare System in New Brunswick, N.J., has also recently implemented SourcePlus Passport at her facility.
Ms. Romano says that her center’s patients have also been pleased with the new system.
“What came to our attention was that one of the big efficiencies that patients were looking for was ease of registration. This new system makes that process much easier for the patient,” she says.
Ms. Romano has seen savings in labor costs as a result of the system’s implementation. “Before, our staff created a medical record by having a nurse call every patient. The calls were very lengthy and normally took 2-4 nurses several hours per day to complete them,” she says. “Now, the patient provides all necessary preoperative information on their own time, from their own home, and their answers are uploaded into our system. We make a phone call after this to verify the information, but the length of the call and the labor needed for this has been cut dramatically.”
Ms. Espenschied has also seen labor expense savings thanks to the automated process. She says that her center’s anesthesia group has eliminated the need for a full-time physician assistant who would complete forms with the information provided by their nurses following preoperative calls. Because SourcePlus Passport auto-populates the forms using the information patients enter into the system, this position is no longer needed.
More than just financial benefits
An automated system can also help reduce errors. “The output from the system prints in same format as our previous medical records, but it is clear and typed,” says Ms. Romano. “Information is also likely more accurate because the patient is at home — with medications in front of them — and no individual is transcribing that information, which can introduce error.”
Turning to an automated system can also help ASCs meet CMS’s new requirements for advance disclosure
“SourcePlus Passport has helped us to meet these CMS requirements fairly easily,” says Ms. Espenschied. “Patients download written disclosures and listen to an audio file discussing patient rights (verbal notification of patient rights is now required by CMS) and provide an electronic signature attesting that they have read and understand the information.”
According to Ms. Romano, having an automated system has eliminated the need for mailers or additional support people to handle the administrative processes that would have been required to meet CMS’s new mandates had the processes had remained manual.
Automation likely to grow
Ron Pelletier, vice president of market strategies for SourceMedical, the company that distributes SourcePlus Passport, expects that ASCs will automate more and more of their processes in the future. He anticipates automatic payment posting and online bill pay to be the next move for ASCs.
“We are really starting to see ASCs making better use of the Internet to automate manual processes, which can benefit their centers by reducing errors and labor costs,” says Mr. Pelletier.
“So many industries have adapted bill pay online, but yet healthcare as an industry lags behind,” he says. “Patients still receive a paper statement for their co-pay or any other out-of-pocket costs. Historical concerns that patients wouldn’t trust interactions over the Internet are beginning to dissipate as society becomes more comfortable with exchanging information over the Internet. As customers become savvier, healthcare providers must as well.”
Contact Lindsey Dunn at lindsey@beckersasc.com.
