Vendor Spotlight: Going Green Produces Immediate and Long-term Cost Reductions for Hospitals

The pressure continues to grow on hospitals to deliver an increasing number of services at high quality and minimized cost. Pressed between informed patients and government mandates, hospitals must reconcile patient satisfaction and care with cost and compliance. Staffing and operations are already pressed to limits, and the demands being placed on personnel are only increasing.

The situation is compounded by flat or decreasing reimbursements from healthcare payers. Increasing costs must be contained and efficiency has become a necessity to offset a multitude of situations. While many hospitals have pursued efficiency as it relates to patient care, the opportunity often remains to match efficient and effective care with efficient and effective business processes.

Care coordination and automation within hospitals and across healthcare organizations is imperative to streamline operations and reduce administrative costs. Cost savings totaling between $500 and $2000 per employee are possible by optimizing business processes.

Enabling hospitals with electronic workflow, unified electronic patient records (converging and consolidating data and records from multiple sources), automated billings, patient portals, and HR portals are just a few examples of common enhancements that can help streamline the business operations of your hospital with the added benefit of increased security and easily documented compliance with external or internal regulations.

Unfortunately, increased documentation for regulatory compliance often results in increased paper consumption and its long-term impact on the environment. Each industry uses paper in its own way, and healthcare organizations aware of the growing concerns for sustainability of the environment and the economy must evaluate their paper use and their participation in this trend.

Welcome to the ScerIS Environmental Initiative. Serious measures must be taken to produce serious results, and for that reason, ScerIS, Inc. is taking action for the sake of the environment. ScerIS, Inc. designs and implements business process optimization solutions, solutions designed to help hospitals reduce current costs and avoid future costs. Their products have a direct impact on paper consumption and they intend to increase that impact by presenting organizations with a simplified decision of whether or not to go “paperless.” When evaluating how and where to eliminate paper from your work environment, the cost must be weighed against the potential benefit and return. What ScerIS has done, is remove most of the cost, allowing you to focus on the benefit and return. ScerIS launched their Environmental Initiative program in October 2007 with the first goals set forth to reduce paper consumption by enough to prevent:

• 1,000,000 trees from being harvested

• 791 million gallons of waste water from being produced

• 116 thousand tons of CO2 from being emitted

To accomplish this, ScerIS has waived the licensing fees on its paper-saving Enterprise Report Management (ERM) system, which is used to replace printed reports with an online report management system that makes printing an option instead of a requirement.

“Upon reviewing the successes of customers using our ERM application over the last 12 years we recognized the significance of the role we can play in the green community,” says Jim Walckner, ScerIS President and CEO. “We are fortunate to be in a position where we have multiple business process optimization solutions and don’t only rely on revenues from our ERM application. We are hoping that, by surrendering our potential revenues for a good cause, we can encourage a green office evolution among organizations that might not have considered this technology due to licensing costs.”

Implementation of the ScerIS ERM application provides for the online storage and access of reports, zero balance purges, and all other output from hospital host applications and secures reports from unauthorized access, and helps hospitals officially retire legacy systems that have been replaced. It puts this information at the fingertips of users and reduces costs associated with printing and distribution, filing, storage, and much more. For example, if your MEDITECH system is taking 10–12 hours to close at month-end, it may have something to do with the number of zero balance accounts in your active Accounts Receivable. Using the ERM solution to move these accounts from MEDITECH to the ScerIS repository will reduce your month-end processing time to a couple of hours. These accounts will be at your fingertips for retrieval, and with forms overlay, the ability to reproduce a bill is just a click away.

ScerIS’ ERM solution is being provided to hospitals without an application software license charge and produces substantial immediate cost reductions of $100,000 to $500,000 per hospital in the direct reduction of paper and forms consumption. Additionally, this solution provides soft cost reductions of $400,000 to $2,000,000 per hospital as resources are freed up to perform higher value work. These systems produce enormous results. Given that ScerIS waves the licensing fee for this application, hospitals typically realize a 1–3 month return on their investment.

To find out more about this offer, or to schedule an online webinar please contact Bob Borr, VP Hospital Solutions at 978-218-5020 or at bborr@sceris.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . ScerIS, Inc., 490 Boston Post Road, Sudbury, MA 01776. TEL: 978-218-5000, FAX: 978-218-5099. WEBSITE: www.sceris.com.