Lahey Clinic Medical Center
Burlington, MA
Lahey Clinic Medical Center is a large multi-specialty ambulatory care and 268-bed hospital that serves more than 3,000 patients each day. Long a leader in clinical innovation, Lahey wanted to be viewed the same way for technology innovation. This is what prompted the organization, in 2001, to seek a technology solution for what it felt was a cumbersome coding process. Ultimately Lahey selected Professional Intelligent Charge Capture from MedAptus due to its depth and breadth of coding and compliance rules and logic.
To support MedAptus, and other systems down the line, Lahey decided to implement an enterprise-wide wireless system. The organization believed that by providing physicians with the ability to wirelessly transmit accurate charge data from patient examination areas to its billing support teams, a multitude of paper forms, and the related document controls, would be eliminated. Additionally, by billing for patient visits on the same day, payment lags would be greatly reduced.
"The one thing that overrides the monetary value MedAptus has delivered is the coding compliance it has given our physicians."
While currently utilizing real-time data feeds from its separate professional scheduling and hospital systems to MedAptus, Lahey initially rolled-out charge capture to a pilot group of users in late 2001 within its main Burlington location, for usage with office visits only. To quantify initial system impact, Lahey conducted a three-month study comparing the performance of its pilot group of 15 users, across four departments, in various areas including recovery of lost charges and lapse from patient visit to charge entry.
What Lahey found was that it had lost no lost charges during the pilot, as well as reduced time-to-charge entry to less than one day. These findings led Lahey to initiate a system-wide outpatient roll-out, on a group-by-group basis. Lahey has since further expanded the MedAptus implementation to include the capture of inpatient charges.
Currently Lahey has about 450 MedAptus users, and estimates it has saved over $1 million annually due to daily charge reconciliation. As a result of such financial improvements, Lahey has been able to invest in new technologies to support continued clinical excellence.
Lahey also served as MedAptus’ development partner for the Facility Edition of Point-of-Care Charge Capture; the hospital is currently deploying the technology to all of its outpatient clinic settings to streamline processes and ensure complete capture of materials, medications, technical procedures and facilities utilization.