SUMMARY
Organization: Adfinitas Health
Location: Hanover, Maryland
Size: 500 employees; 50 hospitals and post-acute facilities in four states
Top-line Requirements:
- Prevent lost charges
- Track provider attribution
- Improve charge lag
- Increase data transparency
- Improve quality measures and reporting
Adfinitas Health, the Mid-Atlantic’s largest private hospitalist group, has been using Ingenious Med since 2008
Challenge
Adfinitas Health, a healthcare staffing and management practice based in Hanover, Maryland, was looking for ways to improve the collection of all necessary paper records and reconcile all charges, especially when multiple providers saw the same patient. Adfinitas Health is dedicated to providing consistent, seamless, and collaborative care across all its sites — which depends on a steady stream of reliable data. Because the organization bills outside of the EMR, Adfinitas Health needed a steadfast solution that could easily surface provider-level data and clarify patient attribution. At the same time, Adfinitas Health also wanted to ensure that the solution was in line with one of its central tenets — transparency. Any new solution had to foster that focus on improved information sharing and data reporting.
Solution
A year into its business, Dr. Tim Capstack joined the organization as a partner and introduced Ingenious Med to the founders. Ingenious Med’s standalone, mobile platform was ideal for Adfinitas Health’s hospitalist programs, where providers often worked at multiple hospitals across different health systems. “From a managerial and documentation standpoint, it just makes life easier and helps run a practice,” said Dr. Tim Capstack, partner and director of clinical integration at Adfinitas Health.
Implementation
As a results-oriented organization, Adfinitas Health needed an effective, quick launch of its new solution, and to see sustained success across its various revenue cycle and quality initiatives. Ingenious Med was able to deliver.
“I know every time the providers are working, they’re in Ingenious Med.”
– Dr. Doug Mitchell, co-founder and CEO, Adfinitas Health
Adfinitas Health began with the rollout of electronic charge capture to reduce the reliance on paper records. To mitigate against potential adoption issues, Adfinitas Health set up a regular training routine and onboarding process to facilitate provider adoption, compliance, and accuracy. As part of the effort to increase transparency, this helped staff feel like they were an active part of the change — instead of feeling like these new processes were simply additional tedious administrative tasks.
That transition was also helped by the hassle-free implementation of Ingenious Med within the hospitalist practice of Adfinitas Health. “It was simple, so there were no implementation issues,” said Dr. Doug Mitchell, co-founder and CEO at Adfinitas Health. “Ingenious Med is a central platform where, at the end of the day, I know that I can actually charge for all the work that the providers deliver.”
Transparency of Data
The focus on transparency meant Adfinitas Health needed access to a wealth of data to understand the issues and challenges its clients, providers, and patients faced. Gathering this data required a massive effort to combine hospital clinical data, regional HIE outcomes data from the Chesapeake Regional Information Systems for our Patients (CRISP), and provider billing data from Ingenious Med.
“We are drowning in data; we have all these metrics,” said Ledys DiMarsico, chief medical officer at Adfinitas Health, who oversees the healthcare analytics team. Since Ingenious Med makes it easy to download all relevant data, it can be mixed and matched fluidly with other data sources.
By combining these disparate data feeds, the organization was able to set up a custom attribution system for billing, quality measures, and patient outcomes — something that had been much more tedious in the past.
“It’s pretty much been a part of the culture within the company: be transparent with the data to help drive positive behavior.”
– Dr. Ledys DiMarsico, chief medical officer, Adfinitas Health
This is a challenge faced by many healthcare organizations in today’s market: accessing data is not the problem — making effective use of that data is the real issue. Through the combination and collation of all of the clinical and billing data, Adfinitas Health was able to see provider-level data and take steps toward adopting best practices and preemptively addressing shortfalls. “Ingenious Med is kind of our jumping off point for a lot of what we do,” said DiMarsico.
Quality Measures
Adfinitas Health has turned to Ingenious Med’s MIPS-qualified registry for tracking and reporting quality measures. While hospitalists are restricted on the number of quality measures they can report on, Ingenious Med has made it easy to turn on or off those measures they want to submit to CMS. This has helped physicians become more efficient, reducing time spent on manually comparing different quality metrics.
“For us, being able to do patient registry reporting through Ingenious Med is very helpful.”
– Dr. Ledys DiMarsico, chief medical officer, Adfinitas Health
Results
Adfinitas Health has continuously improved itself through cultural, technological, and clinical advancements. Throughout the ten-year relationship, Ingenious Med has played a vital role in assisting with these improvements, especially in the areas of revenue cycle enhancement and quality and workflow efficiency.
Revenue Cycle Enhancement
Aided by multiple Ingenious Med features, Adfinitas Health’s revenue cycle has significantly improved. Processes that once took multiple days or weeks, like missing bills reports, now take a fraction of the time.
“[Features] like missing bills and chat functionality — being able to talk back and forth to the providers in real time in the system — have been wonderful,” said Monica Wright, director of compliance and clinical documentation improvement at Adfinitas Health. “It’s made a huge difference in how quickly we’re getting providers to respond when they are missing something and I think that’s going to help greatly with our charge lag.”
The use of SuperBills — especially within the ICU practice — and the implementation of Enterprise Billing have improved the financial team’s ability to get information out quickly to its billing company. “I was able to completely update our process and turn everything here on its ear,” said Wright. “Enterprise Billing loads all at once. While you’re in that charge, making a correction to it and sending a note to the provider, it’s a much more streamlined, much faster process. It took a lot of the headaches away.”
“My superuser told me it went from taking her two days to get through a single missing charges report to just two hours.”
– Monica Wright, director of compliance and clinical documentation improvement, Adfinitas Health
Quality and Workflow Efficiency
By combining the raw Ingenious Med data with the other clinical data sources, Adfinitas Health has produced an efficient workflow for provider comparisons. Rather than embarrassing individual providers, this monthly evaluation inspires training opportunities and care delivery improvement.
With multiple departments working closely together on a variety of cases, hospitals can struggle to pinpoint problem areas. Ingenious Med’s provider-level billing data makes it easier for Adfinitas Health to assess precise physician attribution for patient care and outcomes and offer an actionable solution. “For us, if the hospital can give us the data back, we’d like to bump it against Ingenious Med because [the problem] might not really be us,” said DiMarsico. “Ingenious Med data can help us vet external numbers.”
“We had this whole quality initiative within the company where we made the data transparent … so it drives quality through the transparency … We show each individual provider how they’re performing. So, if you have a co-worker that’s performing a little better than you, it motivates you. You certainly don’t want to be the one that’s not performing.”
– Dr. Ledys DiMarsico, chief medical officer, Adfinitas Health
Examining provider data can also yield unexpected insights. In one case, a provider had a stellar length of stay number for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients. As the Adfinitas Health quality care team reviewed the metrics to see if care redesign could be applied to other providers within the practice, they noticed that a higher number of those patients were being readmitted. Armed with this new information, the provider was able to alter their routines to monitor patients for a longer period of time before discharging.
Through active participation in a number of forums, including Ingenious Med superuser training, Adfinitas Health continues to keep abreast of recent software updates and improved reporting. Knowledge is then transferred throughout the organization through the existing training and transparency initiatives.
Using Ingenious Med has helped Adfinitas Health increase efficiency, achieve transparency, and strengthen its financial footing.
For more information on how Ingenious Med can help transform your organization, speak to an Ingenious Med representative today at 770-799-0909 or sign up for a free demo of the Ingenious Med application.