Ingenious Med

Ingenious Med Reduces Costs and Increases Revenue for Largest Hospital in Louisiana.

Dr. Richard Slataper had some management problems.As Medical Director of the Hospital Medicine Service at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, he is responsible for the performance of 10 hospitalists in Louisiana's largest hospital. But, he found himself lacking critical data he needed to manage his department effectively. The traditional, paper-based, charge capture system could not provide an efficient way to extract the clinical performance of individual physicians. Furthermore, the system was fraught with deficiencies – charge sheets were often unreadable or lost, resulting in delayed submissions, coding errors and poor communications, as well as an unacceptable accounts receivable backlog.

In addition, the hospital's manual charge capture system lacked a realistic way of separating the hospitalists' performance data from the data of the other physicians on the hospital's medical staff. The co-mingling of data resulted in widespread misattributions of performance data. Clearly, there had to be a better system. So, Dr. Slataper began investigating automated management toolsthat could solve the charge capture and data management problems.

After studying all the available software options he chose Ingenious Med's IMBILLS - Network Edition. He used the software individually for over a year to assess its practicality.After the trial, it was adopted by the entire group. Ingenious Med is an Atlanta-based firm founded in 1999 and managed by practicing hospitalists from Emory University Medical Center.When it became available, the group upgraded to IMBILLS - Web Edition. This upgrade is an ASP.net solution that utilizes the Internet and PDA's to provide enterpriselevel charge capture and clinical management at the pointof- care. It is housed on Ingenious Med servers, insuring both security and redundancy. Web Edition allowed physicians and administrators to access and input data from any Webenabled computer at any location.

With the installation of IMBILLS the accumulation of individual physician data began immediately. Over time, the data accumulation has created an increasingly reliable body of verified and useful management information. However, the benefits of IMBILLS are even more dramatic for Dr. Slataper's hospital. The program enabled Our Lady of the Lake hospitalists to code diagnoses more accurately and virtually eliminated lost or misread charge sheets, which has resulted in higher collections and fewer denials. "The data captured by IMBILLS has greatly enhanced our physician coding compliance. Our collections have increased and our coding is highly consistent with our clinical documentation," Dr. Slataper points out.

Here are some of the measurable benefits he found:

Average revenue per physician encounter:
Prior to IMBILLS	$49
With IMBILLS	$79

This resulted in a $700,000 annual revenue increase – an annual increase of $70,000 per physician.

Number of encounters per year
Prior to IMBILLS	20,507
With IMBILLS	24,732

Accounts Receivable
Prior to IMBILLS	110 days
With IMBILLS	35 days

Using IMBILLS data, hospital administration demonstrated that the length of stay for patients within the hospitalist program was 3.5 days compared with the 5.1-day hospital average.

"Obviously there are many factors that impact these numbers in a complex hospital environment," Dr. Slataper commented. "However, IMBILLS was the most significant operational change we made during that period."

In addition to these clearly quantifiable measures, there are numerous more subtle, equally valuable benefits, Dr. Slataper points out."By justifying better physician to patient ratios, IM allows us to put good physicians in a position to practice good medicine," he says."From an organizational standpoint, IMBILLS allows physicians to better organize their rounds. This gives doctors an opportunity to spend more time with patients on medical issues. And because the system is Webbased, there is 24/7 access to all data by the entire team.This makes patient transitions between hospitalists far more efficient. For administration, the accuracy and efficiency of uploading billing data at the point of care increases revenue and reduces costs. For example, we were able to reduce 1/2 of an FTE biller in the first year."

Dr. Slataper found that the Web-based platform was a major benefit, creating ease of access from any Web-enabled location. "Physicians and administrators working at orsupporting multiple locations would find this particularly significant," he points out "The Web platform freed us from the hardware problems of an internal PC network."

Asked why he chose IMBILLS, Dr. Slataper pointed out a number of features:

	The interfaces are highly intuitive making it comparatively easy for doctors to adapt to the system.
	There is excellent hardware flexibility.You can use a PDA, desktop or laptop computer to enter or access patient and practice data. This helps with physician acceptance. A patient census sheet can also be easily printed for cross coverage calls and checkout on our colleagues' patients.
	IMBILLS enables Dr. Slataper to customize queries and reports.This feature allows him to extract the management data he needs and helps minimize charge misattributions. It helps his hospitalist group to isolate and track their activity by minimizing the misattributions inherent in most hospital information systems.

"I was concerned about the disruption of transitioning to an automated system, but it went quite smoothly," he says. "IM supported us with a trainer and 24/7 phone back-up. First and foremost, I learned the program thoroughly myself. It helps to have a 'go-to' person on site. Initially, we did some batch entry as a group.We had some fun at the sessions, by both helping each other and applying some light-hearted peer pressure to get everyone up to speed."

IMBILLS enabled Dr. Slataper to improve his charge capture, coding compliance and practice management capabilities, and he eagerly anticipates Ingenious Med's future product releases. "As a company run by leaders in the hospitalist community, Ingenious Med understands the challenges of mobile, inpatient charge capture and data management. IM's focus on inpatient practice management has cemented IMBILLS as the leading software for hospitalists.They tell me they are now developing a more robust practice management suite which will integrate into IMBILLS, and I'm looking forward to examining how that can help us become even better practitioners."