User Snapshot: Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital

Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital:  Approximately 450 beds, providing acute, sub-acute, ambulatory and home health care services to 350,000 residents in 26 counties in southwest GA Hospital Information System: McKesson HBO Star
User: Cathy Head, Decision Support Analyst
With many requests from her Financial Department, Cathy Head has used Boston WorkStation to write several scripts that perform different kinds of updates for the charge master.

Update price increases.  HBO Star allows for doing a mass price update as long as the price increase is the same across all items. These scripts allow them to update prices on an individual basis. It updates price increases by entering the item number, date and price. It has built-in routines for exceptions. The script uploads the data directly from an Excel® spreadsheet and marks exceptions and whether they are processed directly into the spread sheet. Other scripts enter CPT code changes as Medicare requirements change. These scripts are run periodically throughout the year and they run reliably from start to finish. Cathy reports that “the department loves them”.  Each script took about an hour to write and has not needed to be updated for the last year.

Trend Star Integration.  Cathy recently wrote a script for the Revenue Management department. The department needs to identify accounts for special tracking.  The script runs a report of the patients in Trend Star, and downloads the data to an Excel® spreadsheet. An additional script creates notes in each of the identified accounts to make them easier to track.