Tomball Hospital is a fast-growing facility serving the communities of northwest Houston, Tomball, Waller, Cypress and Magnolia, Texas.
HIS: Meditech Client/Server
User: Marlene Pezzia
Marlene has automated a number of processes and tasks throughout the hospital.
Financial Reporting. Marlene developed a Month End Processing script that generates a variety of reports. Some are printed, some are downloaded, some are downloaded and printed, and some are just sent to the display so it can capture information off the reports. While running the reports, it also collects totals and other information that the script uses to determine if the system is in balance or not. Marlene tells us that initially it was taking an IS staff person an entire day to print/download the reports. they tried to scale back the reports, but it still took a half day to process. Marlene had the script developed address the 1st falling on weekends and holidays, however, with a staff restructure, she lost the person who was performing the process. Automating it kept her from adding the task to someone else's already full workload.
Radiology Reporting. Marlene also used BWS to address the issue of needing to have nurses remember to print draft radiology reports on a nightly basis in order to fulfill a physician request of having the reports on the chart if the report had not been signed yet. This script automates the printing of the reports to multiple locations/printers and kicks off every night at midnight. It is set up to be driven by an INI file so that the parameters determining locations and printers may be easily changed.
Business Office. Two scripts use BWS WebStation to log into the Xactimed website and download any claim submission information from the site that has not been previously processed. It then launches a Meditech session and adds comments to the individual accounts that indicate the status of the claims. Rejected claims are flagged with a comment type that the business office then uses to work and resolve the rejected claims.
Another business office script also goes to the Xactimed site to download "receipt of claim" information which in turn is used to add comments to the account. Marlene points out that the first one was developed because the process was not getting done consistently. They were backlogged three months when the script was developed. The second one was taking several hours to perform manually. "These two scripts are definite resource savings," says Marlene. "freeing up someone to address other issues."
