Superior Customer
Service and Groundbreaking
Technologies Lead St. Cloud Hospital
Home Care and Hospice to Choose
Maestro
St. Cloud
Hospital Home Care and Hospice (St.
Cloud, MN) is now LIVE in both the
clinical and billing environments
with Maestro—a groundbreaking
technology which intuitively
understands the needs of a home care
system. Maestro combines business
intelligence with cutting edge
monitoring tools, to both automate
processes and guide the workflow of
home care clinicians. St. Cloud
migrated to this system from Home
Care Manager, PtCT's earlier clinical
offering for home health agencies,
and so far, its leaders are impressed
with the new functionality.
"We previously used separate
systems for billing, clinical
documentation, and registration, and
had a completely paper-based
scheduling system, so we were anxious
to move to an integrated system,"
says Gail Olson, director of St.
Cloud Hospital Home Care and Hospice.
"We evaluated all our options,
but in the end, PtCT's superior
customer support and the high level
of trust we had already built with
them stood out as defining reasons to
choose Maestro."
Eben Hollingsworth, vice president of
client services at PtCT, says his
company is also excited to see the
impact Maestro will have on St. Cloud's
staff—including 80 clinicians,
and 400 active patients. "We're
confident they will see immediate
results from this implementation,"
he says. "St. Cloud is an
exemplary site—they have worked
hard through the training and
implementation, and have completed it
effectively."
Proper
Planning, Better Results
The hard work began with St. Cloud
taking a proactive approach to
setting up the implementation and
training plan. The site designated a
group of super users to assemble
training content, set up the system,
and educate its 80 field staff and 20
in-house staff. The group of super
users, including two point people
assigned to compile the training
documentation, kept everyone on track
and ensured seamless communication
with the PtCT implementation team.
"PtCT was supportive of our
training methodologies and provided
us with additional training
documentation, which was helpful,"
says Olson. "Our staff, both
clinical and administrative, remained
goal-oriented during pre-LIVE, which
helped everything move along smoothly."
St.
Cloud's Billing department was
particularly focused, as they
understood the time put into the
process would provide a better end
result. "As a hospital-based
agency, our billing director and
billing staff have worked with other
vendors on the hospital side. They
knew what they wanted and were able
to communicate clearly to PtCT what
the gaps were and what solutions they
would like to see, which pushed
changes quickly into the system,"
says Olson. "Their ability to
clearly state 'here's what we did,
here's the outcome, and here's the
gap,' also helped those in design and
support."
St. Cloud also developed a specific
training strategy, once they realized
that it would be an extended time
from when the billing staff began
training until they generated real
claims in the system. "The
billing staff decided early on to
practice 30 minutes every day, to be
sure they did not forget the
processes before the first claim came
across their desk," says Olson.
Getting
Satisfaction for Patients and Staff
One of St. Cloud's on-going
initiatives is ensuring patient
satisfaction at all times, but their
old paper-based scheduling system
seemed to only cause frustration.
"In a paper-based system, it was
impossible to see what was going on
from the patient's perspective,"
says Olson. "Now, thanks to
Maestro's electronic scheduling
capabilities, we can see who is
planning to see the patient each week
to be sure our resources are being
used effectively."
St. Cloud is
also focused on educating its staff
to use the electronic patient
schedule for more proactive care. For
instance, to increase
interdisciplinary communication,
users can utilize the scheduling
notes to alert other staff of patient
preferences or supplies needed in the
home. In addition, the site hopes
Maestro will improve employee
satisfaction. With the intuitive
process flow in Maestro, users are
provided with many reminders—including
when a patient is out of orders, when
a supervisory visit is required, or
when a procedure needs to be
completed during a visit.
"Validation checks require our
staff to go through the necessary
steps in order to successfully admit
a patient or produce a claim,"
says Olson. "Additionally, the
task-based system, combined with the
validation checks, assure clinicians
that they have everything completed
the first time. This has reduced the
number of time-consuming corrections
and the number of non-billable visits,
which our clinicians really
appreciate!"
Streamlining
Processes, Increasing Efficiency
Still another area where Maestro has
proven useful for St. Cloud has been
in their effort to reduce employee
travel time by grouping its staff
into geographic care teams. "Maestro
allows us to schedule by team, which
reinforces our current concept and
should lead to more time for patient
visits," says Olson. "Maestro
will also be able to assist us with
orientation for new clinicians,
especially those who have not been in
home care before, because the task
flow guides you through the processes.
It is so easy to forget when an
assessment is due or when a
supervision visit is due,
particularly for someone new."
But workflow improvements aren't all
Maestro has in store for St. Cloud.
By streamlining operations,
centralizing clinical and billing
data, and increasing actionable
reports with Maestro, St. Cloud is
also hoping to see marked
improvements in its bottom line.
"As margins become smaller and
reimbursements more complicated, we
need to know what we will be paid
versus what we're spending for each
patient and each episode," says
Olson. "When compared to Home
Care Manager, Maestro's reports gives
me this information much earlier in
the process."
For the coming year, St. Cloud has
set a few primary goals in motion,
which include instituting additional
training options and implementing
Maestro for hospice. "We want to
be as efficient as possible going
forward, and Maestro will help us
achieve this goal," concludes
Olson.