Sometimes You Have to Fight for What's Best
John Holton, President and CEO, SCI Solutions
Have you heard this one? A salesman walks into a hospital CIO's office and says, "I've got a product that is guaranteed to decrease physician satisfaction, lose market share and increase A/R days. In addition, it is cumbersome, unsophisticated and costs an arm and a leg."
The CIO says, "Great, I'll take one."
I know you're probably saying, "Is this supposed to be a joke?” Nope, it’s not supposed to be. It happens in hospitals all the time.
Every day, big Hospital Information Technology (HIT) vendors try to convince hospital CIOs to buy their scheduling products even though they know their product has obvious (and critical) weaknesses when compared with specialty vendors such as SCI. These broad-line vendors know their products will not solve the important issues facing today’s Access Manager, and still they persist. They try to convince the CIO that the hospital will not have an “integrated database” if they use the better product. If that fails, they will tell interfacing horror stories. When the CIO takes the easy road and pushes through an inferior product, the institution is effectively saying that customer satisfaction and revenue cycle efficiency are less important than standing up to these HIT bullies.
Today's Access Managers face challenges that were impossible to conceive of even 10 years ago. Order completeness and legibility challenges; Medical Necessity checking and ABN compliance; eligibility verification in the age of high deductible health savings accounts; increased authorization requirements; manipulative payors; intense competition for physician loyalty and ever decreasing reimbursement rates that require doing more with less. All these factors are new and important challenges that have to be addressed. Yet, the broad-line HIT vendors ask you to deal with these institution-threatening challenges using systems designed in the early 1990s, an entirely different era in Access Management. HIT vendors, despite knowing their systems are not designed to effectively address these new issues, play what they think is their trump card: “We have an integrated database!”
Let's explore the validity of this claim.
A hospital HIT system holds specific data that is used to perform certain tasks such as registration and for reporting on the outcomes of hospital activity. As long as the data is in the HIT system when it is needed, why should it matter how the data gets in the database? Does it really matter whether it is typed directly into the HIT workstation or typed into the more current and sophisticated specially developed Access Management system and then electronically inserted into the HIT database via an interface? The user is doing the same work and the results are the same.
The HIT system can use the data just as if it had been entered directly. The data is there and is “integrated.” The only additional work required in the second scenario is a one-time set-up and periodic monitoring of the interface.
Let’s examine the extent of this extra work.
Today Health Level 7 (HL7) is an industry standard for formatting healthcare data and the rules that govern its transfer between different vendors’ systems. As with any industry standard (e.g., electrical appliances use 110 or 220 volts), manufacturers agree to comply with the standard for the good of the consumers. In healthcare IT, this standard is HL7. Hundreds of millions of transactions flow between computer systems of different hospital vendors each day via HL7. Each transaction puts data into the hospital’s database, ensuring “integration” and its use by the HIT system just as if it were entered by hand. So much for the value of the HIT vendor’s trump card!
When the integration argument fizzles, another tactic employed is quoting an outrageous price tag to install these interfaces. HIT vendors act as if they are inventing something new that requires much research and programming. The reality is that specialty Access Management systems like SCI use standard HL7 ADT transactions that have been installed hundreds of times across the country in all size hospitals, to pass data to big vendor registration systems. There is nothing difficult about installing these interfaces, and the development, installation and testing should take less than a week. Claims by vendors that these interfaces are impossible or expensive are false. They are simply scare tactics.
So the bottom line is: Don’t be scared off by big HIT vendors and don’t feel forced to buy their scheduling product. Your hospital, your customers and you deserve the best solution available.
SCI offers the most advanced Access Management solutions on the market—solutions to improve your ease-of-access, streamline front-end processes, strengthen physician loyalty and improve your revenue cycle. And they will work great (and interface to integrate great) at your hospital.
Sometimes you have to fight for what's best.
client quote:
“With SCI we reduced our lab monthly denials from $23,000 to 0, and increased utilization from 400 average orders a month to 3,230, as well as improved patient, physician and staff satisfaction.”
Eisenhower Medical Center
 |
Sign up for a free Webinar |
 |
Watch our 3-minute PowerView summary |
 |
Request an SCI Patient Access consultation |
 |
Put the SCI Superheros to work for you |
