Vendor Spotlight: Workflow Efficiency Abounds for MEDITECH Clients using Boston WorkStation

Contributed by: Margaret Mayer, Director of Marketing, Boston Software Systems

Technology for the healthcare industry is one of the fastest-growing areas of software development, and healthcare organizations of every size are under constant pressure to invest wisely in technology solutions that are flexible and will extend the capability of their applications. Hospitals across the country that rely on MEDITECH use a tool called Boston WorkStation™ to automate data gathering and remotely manage and monitor personnel as they interact with MEDITECH.

Boston WorkStation is a workflow automation and integration technology that allows healthcare organizations to respond to changing business, financial and compliance requirements by automating common tasks throughout the organization including revenue cycle projects, interactions with Web sites, integrating new applications, systems and devices, and electronically monitoring and managing user activity.

“Boston WorkStation is used in over 500 MEDITECH facilities around the world,” said Steve Cohen, executive vice president, Boston Software Systems. “Scripting is compatible with every MEDITECH system - Magic, Client Server, NUI, as well as all MEDITECH modules and applications. We’ve designed specific products for our MEDITECH users, such as the UNISON dictionary synchronization tool, which can accelerate the development of a dictionary synchronization from 30 hours to 20 minutes, and schedule it to occur regularly without human intervention. MEDITECH hospitals can use Boston WorkStation to streamline business processes and automate workflow easily throughout the hospital.”

Greenwich Hospital Handles Data Conversion in Days

It didn’t take long for Brian Thiel, Manager of Managed Care at Greenwich Hospital, a 174-bed community hospital serving lower Fairfield County, Connecticut and Westchester County, New York, to realize the power of scripting technology. Brian manages many time-intensive and monotonous projects involving data entry or data transfer. Yet, they are critical for the efficient flow of managed care contracts and fee schedules. He had always wondered why there wasn’t a way to automate these tasks and eliminate the need to spend so many man-hours on these projects. Two years ago, while at a MEDITECH User Group Conference (MUSE), Brian met the people from Boston Software Systems. When he learned about their workflow automation tool, Boston WorkStation, he found what he was looking for.

In his position, Brian had been analyzing managed care contracts and fee schedule tables, and loading these fee schedules into MEDITECH. The challenge is that there are several hundred CPT (current procedural codes) that are associated with the prices in these contracts. It used to take Brian three days to load each new fee schedule for each managed care contract for every year that it was updated.

“Multiply that by at least 10 contracts, and you’re talking about a months worth of time spent on manual data entry and nothing else,” Brian said. “This was one of the reasons why we were going over budget in the business office.”

Brian then used Boston WorkStation to automate the upload. It took him only a day to write the script and the benefit has been dramatic. Automating just this task is saving the hospital tens of thousands of dollars per year. And this is only one of the places where Brian is using scripting. He uses the tool to convert all of the appointments that are in one of the dictionaries to the new central scheduling module in MEDITECH. More than 10,000 appointments had already been registered and booked in advance in the previous system. Brian needed a way to convert all of those appointments into the proper time slots in the new system.

Brian also created a Boston WorkStation script to first take an extract out of the dictionary and convert it into an Excel spreadsheet. The script continues by automatically and accurately pulling the appointments from the spreadsheet and uploading them to the MEDITECH scheduling module. This kind of dictionary conversion project would normally take 700 man-hours or about $10,000. If it had been done on an overtime basis, it would have cost them $16,000. Brian wrote the script in four hours and had it running and finished by the end of the week. “It’s essentially like having an extra employee or two,” he says. “Any time you have a lot of data you need to transfer, that’s where a script is really useful and saves a lot of time,” he says.

Coffee Health Group Automates Processes, Generates Revenue

Ben Bowling, interface/intranet specialist for Coffee Health Group, a not-for-profit health care system located in Northwest Alabama, has also realized the power of scripting. Coffee Health Group includes Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Florence, AL, and Shoals Hospital in Muscle Shoals, AL, and an outpatient facility. It has more than 200 physicians on staff representing more than 42 specialty areas.

Ben and his IT team are using scripting throughout Coffee Health Group’s three main facilities to automate processes, generate billing files and patient care reports, and manage many departmental reporting processes. The business office realized that the hospital was losing potential revenue in the emergency department based on a problem with the coding of nursing assessments. Since the health group had no designated employee entering the coding for the emergency department, the codes for the thousands of nursing assessments that occur at the hospital each day were often done improperly. This cost the hospital staff valuable time and the hospital money in lost revenue, because without correct coding, the claims could not be processed.

Using Boston WorkStation, the IT team created a script that generates a spreadsheet of the billing codes for the nursing assessments in the emergency department. Every assessment is entered into a batch that is automatically posted each night, and the spreadsheet is time-stamped for validation.

In order to be billed correctly, patient charges must be posted on the same day, and automating this process ensures that a complete, accurate batch posts each night, guaranteeing the billing cycle and maintaining a steady and accurate revenue flow. In fact, the hospital estimates that it has generated about $30,000 of new revenue each month - this is money that was being lost through poor claims processing before scripting was used.

Ben stated that “it would have been humanly impossible to achieve these results without Boston WorkStation. The automation we now achieve with Boston WorkStation touches every department of the hospital.”

As evidenced by these examples, automating specific tasks yields fast returns on investment. Intelligent automation tools allow hospitals to develop processes that manage and support end users. As a result, organizations can address not only their technological and tactical needs, but also strategic business requirements.

Margaret Mayer directs Boston Software Systems' marketing activities, including market strategy, field and technical marketing, marketing communications and public relations. Prior to Boston Software Systems, she was with New Era of Networks, where she was responsible for all marketing communications initiatives as vice president of Corporate Marketing. Prior to New Era of Networks, Ms. Mayer was VP of Marketing for MicroScript Corporation, where she directed the marketing efforts of this healthcare integration products company. She has a BA degree in English from San Diego State University and completed post-graduate studies in advertising and marketing.