University Physician Associates of New Jersey (UPA)
Newark, NJ
University Physician Associates of New Jersey (UPA) is a 350-doctor group and the faculty practice plan of The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), the nation's largest health sciences university. UPA physicians bill for more than 500,000 patient visits per year, which amounts to over $325,000,000 in charges.
In 2002, UPA executives recognized the need to decrease administrative costs for billing and coding, while still maintaining excellence in its compliance efforts. This led UPA to seek a solution that would help its physicians make more informed and accurate coding decisions - proactively - in order to improve compliance, yet also create a more efficient revenue cycle.
"The system paid for itself within six months of initial rollout. And as for ongoing financial benefit, we feel it will be about $6.7 million per year."
"Now I can save the resource most in demand - time."
After deciding that mobile charge capture was the needed solution, UPA set-out to find the right vendor. The organization reviewed six different products, but ultimately selected MedAptus' Professional Intelligent Charge Capture due to its flexibility and powerful coding logic and rules.
UPA next identified about 30 physicians to participate in a pilot program. After only three months of charge capture usage, UPA experienced a 13.9 percent increase in gross charges per encounter and was able to reduce days-to-bill by 15 days. A sampling of the physician-users determined that the average physician captured an additional $38,000 in gross charges during the three-month study period.
Given the positive results from the pilot group, UPA decided to further its roll-out of charge capture to physicians via an incremental approach. These efforts were guided by department physician champions who participated in both system set-up and training to help maximize adoption. The organization also negotiated with its outsourced billing vendor that for every department demonstrating a 75 percent system throughput, the vendor would offer a discount on fees that UPA passes along to physicians (yielding over $400,000 in savings).
Over two years later, with almost 300 full-time MedAptus users, UPA completed another study looking at changes in gross charge generation and determined that as a result of a 25 percent improvement, the organization could expect an annual recurring benefit of over $6 million dollars.
UPA currently has close to 400 users of Point-of-Care Charge Capture.