Medical College of Wisconsin
Milwaukee, WI
The Medical College of Wisconsin, the state’s only private medical school and largest research institution, was founded in 1893 and includes more than 900 faculty physicians that care for 260,00 patients annually. The 50 physicians that practice within the school’s Department of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM) have 100,000 annual visits from 25,000 patients across four separate community hospitals (sponsored by three separate healthcare systems).
For years the physicians within DFCM relied on a “Paper and Automobile” based system for inpatient coding and billing – each doctor was expected to code encounters on paper, which would subsequently be data-entered by administrative staff. In time, DFCM found – as many groups do - this manual approach was yielding systemic errors, including missed opportunities and administrative inefficiencies. And unlike charge capture in the outpatient setting, which was supported by office-based electronic records technology, inpatient charge capture lacked such tools; the situation was further compounded by the fact that doctors travel frequently to multiple locations.
"Overall, our experience with MedAptus' technology has been quite positive. The decision to let faculty “synch it in,” along with our efforts to re-engineer workflows, has been the winning combination for effectively addressing numerous inpatient charge capture challenges"
Concerned about revenue loss stemming from manual charge capture, DFCM turned to technology for a fix. Department administrators were confident that providers would adopt an electronic charge capture solution – residents had been using EMRs at hospital sites, while most of the faculty were proficient using handheld computers to manage calendars and access clinical reference guides. In the search for electronic charge capture technology, DFCM required that the solution have proven physician adoption, be able to work in a disconnected environment, and would be easily integrated with other systems.
Shortly after initiating a vendor search, DFCM selected MedAptus’ Professional Charge Capture given its demonstrated ease-of-use, strong utilization in academic settings, and proven financial benefit. DFCM’s first deployment of the solution was a four-month pilot with a small group of doctors at one hospital to establish proof of concept.
To measure pilot success, DFCM decided to look at changes in timeliness, charge lag, average number of charges and faculty acceptance. What DFCM learned was that, after only three-months of usage, timeliness increased from 50 percent to over 90 percent, charge lag decreased from 20 days to three and the average number of inpatient charges (invoices) per month increased by 62 percent. In addition, the faculty overwhelmingly agreed that the system was preferable to paper and yielded higher accuracy. With such positive results, the pilot ended early and full roll-out continued to the other providers and inpatient locations.
DFCM has since completed its deployment of MedAptus; the department’s administration continues to measure impact of the software on its revenue cycle. The latest measurement reveals that charge timeliness and volume remain consistently high, at volumes well-above the pre-MedAptus levels. In June 2008, the MedAptus implementation was honored with DFCM’s "Clinical Project of the Year Award," another testament to the project’s success.