BID-Plymouth is an acute care, community hospital with 155 beds and nearly 9,000 annual admissions that serves the population of southeastern Massachusetts. Formerly known as Jordan Hospital, in 2014 the organization joined the prestigious Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center family of hospitals.
The organization first became familiar with MedAptus in 2009 when the company’s Pro Charge Capture solution was deployed to more easily manage the capture of physician pro-fee charges for E&M levels and bedside procedures.
As with most community hospitals, Beth Israel Deaconess-Plymouth (BID-Plymouth) relies on a team of hospitalists to manage the care for its admitted patients. There are seven hospitalists on shift each day at BID-Plymouth and each typically carries a daily load of between 12-14 patients. The hospitalists have enjoyed using technology to document and submit encounters for payment over the past several years, yet there was still one manual task facing them each morning, one that has been crying out for automation: creating the patient list.
Virtually every hospitalist knows the pain of ‘creating the list,’ a necessary step to ensure every admitted patient is seen by a member of the hospital medicine group each day over the course of his or her admission. This list making task is commonly performed by a member of the hospital medicine team, either clinical or administrative in nature, and usually happens early in the morning in order for rounds to start in a timely manner.
Understanding that this process was ripe for automation – and intelligent automation at that, MedAptus launched its Assign platform to ease and improve the daily patient distribution process. The product is capable of computing a variety of data points from admission history to payer to PCP in order to generate the best patient-provider match.
After learning of the new offering, Rob Flaherty, MD, medical director over the hospitalist team at BID-Plymouth, was eager to see if the solution would save his team time, enabling each provider to start rounds earlier and with better information. “After using Assign for only a short period of time, one thing was quite clear: the software was handily dealing with the administrative task of assignment in a much more efficient manner than we’d been able to previously, relying on our memories and spreadsheets. In fact, Assign generates our daily list in only minutes whereas previously this took upwards of 45 minutes each morning,” he said.
Once the software processes the custom logic for appropriate distribution, taking into consideration continuity and load balancing, patient lists are sent to nursing stations for printing; each provider uses a hard copy of the list for note taking during rounds. “Our list accuracy has vastly improved via Assign. The list creation process is now consistent in its approach and typically 100% accurate. While we are on paper now, we will soon implement seamless integration of Assign with MedAptus’ Pro solution, perfecting the reconciliation of billing opportunities against patient assignments,” added Dr. Flaherty.
- Reduce Cost
- Save Time
