Situation Assessment
The primary goal of BroMenn is to deliver high quality, personal care to patients in need.  To realize this goal today and into the future, they must efficiently and proactively pursue payment for care and services provided.  A key measure of billing efficiency is “Discharged Not Final Billed”, or DNFB.  This is the time between the patient’s discharge and final claim drop.  BroMenn determined they could decrease their DNFB by proactively pre-certifying physician orders for items such as medical necessity, physician signature and date, and pre-coding.

BroMenn instituted pilot program for Radiology physician orders.  This pilot program was a manual, paper-based process.  Physician orders were received via traditional fax machines in the Radiology department.  Radiology would scan the paper faxes into their medical information management application which made them available for pre-service screening.  This manual pilot program was a huge success and provided a 60% reduction in their DNFB days.  As part of this pilot, several other process improvements and opportunities for better communication became apparent while also realizing the obvious… that there was no reason to print and scan all this paper! 

Solution Overview
Based on extensive process improvement experience and our Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status, Risetime was selected to partner with BroMenn to turn the manual paper process into a paperless process.  Risetime developed a robust solution that would allow BroMenn to manage physician orders and leverage their existing IT investments in Open Text Fax Server and Microsoft SharePoint.  

Physician offices fax orders into the same department fax numbers they always have which made the implementation of the solution transparent to them, and allowed for a seamless transition.  The faxes are received electronically into a fax server and moved automatically into SharePoint.  Once in SharePoint, the fax images are available to users through a familiar web page.

The orders are now in a centralized, secure area that is accessible to those with appropriate security permissions.  Unique views were created to accommodate the needs of each user group and management.  Views correspond to the status given to orders at each stage of the process to easily identify those that are new, have been worked, that need more information or are pending.

In combination with configuring the out of the box SharePoint functionality, Risetime installed several proprietary products to make pre-screening of orders more efficient and easier within the SharePoint platform: 

• Image Splitter – separates multiple page faxes into the appropriate number of files
• Tiff Viewer – provides a side-by-side view of the fax image and the data entry fields
• Clone – Creates multiple copies of fax images and saves them in the fax library   
• Forward – Allows users to send fax images to departments’ printers or email inboxes
• Purge – Configurable records retention policy for Physician Orders

Value Measurement
The Medical Fax Management for SharePoint solution allows BroMenn Regional Medical Center to realize the following benefits:

• Facilitated responsive and consistent pre-certification processes, policies and procedures which provides seamless patient service 
• Allows 24/7 access for all departments to efficiently retrieve their physician order images and related data from a simple search interface 
• Increased patient satisfaction regarding interactions and communications with all Hospital staff
• Audit history of access to electronic physician orders 
• Streamlined and standardized the tasks and processed associated with pre-screening physician orders  
• Crucial to BroMenn’s “Green” initiatives: saves paper and resources

To find out more on how Risetime can provide similar high-quality results to your business, contact us.