As manager of managed care at Greenwich Hospital in Connecticut, it didn't take Brian Thiel long to realize the power of scripting technology. Thiel manages many time-intensive and repetitive projects involving data entry or data transfer which 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, eliminating the many man-hours spent on these projects.
Two years ago, while at a Meditech User Group Conference (MUSE), Thiel learned about Boston Software Systems and their workflow automation tool, Boston WorkStation. He figured he found the answer.
Boston WorkStation is a workflow automation and integration technology that allows healthcare organizations to automate 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.
Before Boston WorkStation, Thiel wasn't even aware of a software product capable of automating manual tasks, such as transferring data from one source to another like converting registration information to centralized scheduling. He didn't think that scripting technology could be reliable and flexible enough to use virtually anywhere he needed to connect systems or move data.
Greenwich Hospital is a 174-bed community hospital, serving lower Fairfield County, CT, and Westchester County, NY. It is a major academic affiliate of Yale University School of Medicine and a member of the Yale New Haven Health System. Since opening in 1903, Greenwich Hospital has evolved into a progressive medical center and teaching institution with an internal medicine residency. Sixty percent of the hospital's patients are outpatient, and 40 percent are inpatient.
Thiel has been in his current role for the past three years, analyzing managed care contracts and fee schedule tables. Part of his job is loading these fee schedules into Meditech. The challenge is that there are several hundred CPT (current procedural technology) codes that are associated with the prices in these contracts.
It used to take 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 it's about a month's worth of time spent on manual data entry and nothing else. This was one of the reasons why Greenwich was going over budget in the business office.
When Thiel turned to Boston WorkStation to automate the upload. It took 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.
Another project Thiel worked on in the hospital involved converting registration information to centralized scheduling. Thiel saw an opportunity to use scripting 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. He needed a way to convert all of those appointments into the proper time slots in the new system.
Thiel created a 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 be $16,000. The script took four hours to write and test, and it finished uploading the appointments by the end of the week.
Thiel is also using Boston WorkStation in the materials management area, which handles
conversions through two systems--Meditech for billing and charges, and Lawson for cost reporting. The hospital purchases products for materials management through the Lawson
system. Typically, there are discrepancies between the codes used in Lawson and those in Meditech. Staff in the materials management department needed to reregister the new charge codes in Meditech so it would match the Lawson price numbers.
Usually all this data entry is done manually, but Thiel wrote a script that loads 8,000 charge codes into Meditech and reduced a three-week project to one day.
Thiel is pleased that he can create a script not only to perform functions, but to also respond to conditions such as pop-ups, variations in system speed or even kicking off another application. Since the script does just what a person would do, one creates a script by walking through the project just as a person would.
“By applying this tool throughout the hospital, I've built my own job description. I plan to
analyze workflows in each department to locate opportunities for greater efficiency in day-to-day tasks,” Thiel says. “In addition to improving workflow of manual tasks, Boston WorkStation has allowed us to reallocate resources to more patient-critical areas. A keen eye on workflow is definitely helping the hospital.”
For more information about Boston WorkStation, visit www.bostonworkstation.com or call 866.653.5105.
