Citizens
Memorial Healthcare Smooths Processes with Maestro
(6/23/2009)
One of the biggest challenges for today's home
care agencies is finding ways to obtain maximum reimbursement
for their services. Citizens Memorial Healthcare, a hospital-based
home care agency in Bolivar, Missouri, is turning to
information technology to meet those needs, most recently
through a migration from PtCT's legacy clinical system Home
Care Manager to Maestro.
"Maestro helps us manage our episodes of care, while
still providing quality care," says Jennifer Earl, IS
specialist at Citizens. "It also improves our
documentation skills, which will allow us to get better
reimbursement from Medicare."
After working with the staff at PtCT to ensure a smooth
migration, Citizens soon began realizing the benefits of the
new system. "PtCT had the implementation well mapped out
for us, and everything flowed perfectly," says Valerie
Noblitt, RNBC, director home care services at Citizens.
"They kept everything on track with a thorough timeline."
Clinicians
Experience Benefits of e-Signature and Improved Documentation
By moving to a groundbreaking technology, Citizens now has
automated processes and a system which guides the workflow of
home care clinicians, including the ability to sign
electronically and document at the patient's home. Prior to
Maestro, Citizens created workarounds in Home Care Manager to
automate certain processes, such as the electronic signature
feature for physicians.
"Our biggest benefit to date is that we no longer have a
workaround for physician e-signature," says Noblitt.
"With the workaround, our clinicians had to enter
information in twice; now we enter it only once, and then all
of the orders and 485s flow into the sign queue to be signed."
Another benefit of using an intuitive, process-based system
like Maestro is the ability to document at the point of care.
Maestro ensures processes are done in the proper order, are
completed in a timely manner, and lets nothing slip between
the cracks.
"Clinicians are less likely to forget to add a plan of
care or document a treatment," says Earl. "We have
more accurate documentation and the information is going to
be readily available for the next clinician caring for the
patient."
Saving
Time, Smoother Processes
Prior to Maestro, Citizens chose to bill through its hospital's
billing system, which pushed billing data into Home Care
Manager but it did not flow into the Medicare payment system.
"It took a large amount of time to manually enter all
our billing information into the Medicare system," says
Noblitt. "We are now electronically filing everything
through Maestro, which has made it tremendously easier and
less time consuming."
Additionally, Citizens does not have to rely on an interface
because all the charges and tasks are in Maestro. "We do
not have to go into another system to get our charges and
ensure everything flowed correctly through the interface,"
adds Noblitt. "It's made a big difference."
Citizens' billing process runs more efficiently with Maestro,
and in turn the reimbursement turnaround has improved due to
the e-signature feature.
"The orders and plan of treatment are signed more
quickly with e-signature, because they don't wait on a desk
to be signed or received," says Noblitt. "When they
are ready to be signed, they go into the sign queue and stay
there until signed. Prior to this process, we faxed orders
and plan of treatment back and forth. The two potential
problems with a faxed order or plan of treatment is it gets
lost in the fax, and we have to resend, or the physicians lay
the order or plan of treatment down on their desk and forget
about it."
Achieving
Excellence
In 2008, Citizens was awarded with OCS HomeCare Elite, which
is given to the top 25% of Medicare-certified home care
agencies in the U.S. The award recognizes those agencies
whose performance measures in quality outcomes, quality
improvement, and financial performance are the best. Stemming
off this accomplishment, Citizens has set out to be in the
top 20% in patient outcomes in all the indicators reported by
Medicare on its Web site.
"We are well-positioned in our pay for performance (P4P)
initiatives," says Noblitt. "We have three
indicators in top 20% right now, and three to five others are
in 2-3% of being within the top 20%. By implementing Maestro
to improve our documentation and quality care, we're on the
right track to achieve this goal very soon."
MEDITECH
Medical
Information Technology, Inc.
MEDITECH Circle
Westwood, MA 02090
781-821-3000
www.meditech.com