By By JOHN EBY / Niles Daily Star
DOWAGIAC – More than a year ago, Ascension Health, the holding company of which Borgess-Lee Memorial Hospital is a member, delegated its revenue cycle to Accretive, a management specialist.
Restructuring that is now being implemented crosses five functions in the revenue cycle – patient registration, HIS (health information systems, formerly known as medical records), transcription, billing and in-patient and out-patient coding procedures for Medicaid and Medicare, according to Borgess-Lee Memorial Chief Operating Officer Bill Daam.
"We used to do that whole process manually," Daam said Tuesday. "Each one of those functions was separate."
These changes, including a few layoffs, are part of the larger process of automating the Borgess Health system.
"Now we image documents that are provided on a computer," Daam explained, instead of using paper charts. "A doctor, instead of going up to medical records and asking for Mrs. Smith's chart, and they hand him a big wad of papers, now they look at a digitally-imaged chart on a computer."
"The other part of all this," he continued, "in our laboratory, our radiology department and our pharmacy, we had information systems, but we didn't have the piece in between all of them to order stuff online. We had the information systems in each isolated department, but they had to manually order a lab or radiology. Now we have an order-entry product that ties all those information systems together."
Daam said the automation is eliminating manual processes, providing doctors with better access to patient information. However, the automation and restructuring also eliminated two positions.
"The bottom line is that there were 19 people in the functions in that revenue cycle." Daam said. "Ultimately, two people are laid off. The rest were all given an option for different jobs. One was offered a position she decided not to take. Another was offered a position and she's deciding."
Two new job titles, "patient access associates" and "insurance specialists," who talk to patients before they receive services, have been introduced.
Billing has been centralized in Kalamazoo.
"We have to continually try to modernize the health care environment because we're trying to reduce our costs," Daam said. "This automation should improve the decision process and record-keeping, minimize errors in writing things down, so from an organizational perspective it really benefits everybody."