Problem: In 2002, Emory University’s hospitalist group – the Emory Hospital Medicine Unit (EHMU) – employed 10 physicians at three locations and suffered from lost charges, high denial rates, undercoding, and 60 to 90 day charge lag. Despite a nearly three-to-one physician to biller ratio, Emory lost charges and was unable to contest denied bills. In order to solve these problems, Emory’s management implemented Ingenious Med’s IM Practice Manager solution for its physicians, billers, and administrators.
Solution:A short time after roll-out, in 2005, Emory’s program had turned around - it employed 60 hospitalists in 10 locations, and had increased the number of charges captured, decreased denials, reduced charge lag to two days, and increased the physician to biller ratio to 10 to one. Today, the program continues to grow.
Emory’s decision to purchase and implement Ingenious Med’s IM Practice Manager solution generated several quantitative improvements:
• Revenue per encounter increases of 20-50%.
• Revenue per physician increases of $30-60,000.
• Increased charges captured by between 8-17%.
• Increased physician to biller ratio from 3 to 1 – to 10 to 1.
• Decreased denial rates by 4-7%.
• Decreased the denied charge write-off rate by 12-17%.
In addition to providing substantial revenue benefits, IM Practice Manager also enabled Emory to optimize their staffing support for physicians, and made possible the following staffing improvements:
• Training is simpler and less expensive.
• Only 0.1 FTE is dedicated to each hospitalist and there are expert users at each facility.
• Auditing is streamlined and there is 0.3 FTE for all sites.
• The reimbursement team has been right sized. There are only six FTEs for an organization with about $10M net revenue.
While IM Practice Manager has improved Emory’s profitability and operations, it also has improved Emory’s quality of care by enabling rounding hospitalists to focus more on patient care.
Practicing hospitalists created IM Practice Manager, and the program enhances physicians’ workflow in the following ways:
• Real-time communication is possible between staff
and physicians.
• Customer service improves because physicians and staff can access archived patient information from any facility.
• Primary care physician satisfaction improves because of faxed discharge summaries.
• Maintenance of user access is locally controlled.
• Real-time analysis of productivity saves administrative time.
Results: IM Practice Manager has generated between $30,000 and $60,000 per physician for the Emory Hospital Medicine Unit. Given IM Practice Manager’s™ ASP interface and scalability throughout growing practices, the substantial return on investment has helped EHMU become one of the most profitable departments in the Emory University Hospital System
