Tuesday, August 28, 2012

People Process Management Through Medical Laboratory Billing Systems

By Terry Mac


Laboratory billing within the medical processing market is one of the most intricate fields. The reason is that each year, laboratory billing gets more and more intricate as a result of ongoing changes within the field like payer practices, expected challenges connected with Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) in addition to increasing compliance specifications. Along with the continuous aging population and developed diagnostic testing, laboratory billing faces escalating billing volumes too and thus, the load of billing information every once in awhile. The way labs cope with this often is by employing billing representatives but in the end increases costs along with the changing landscape from the prior solutions. Additionally, while not all representatives might be good, there will still be discrepancies seen in the billing strategies causing less improvement on billing and receivable performance and highly impacting what we call people process.

Appropriate automation is the key in enhancing this not merely through Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) only but also with the help of adaptive case management solutions incorporated with LIMS and billing systems to ultimately minimize costs, enhance medical billing accuracy with the sustained automation, improve cash collections and guarantee compliance all throughout. Because of adaptive case management, this completes and expands the people process that is related to unpredictable, repeatable back-office work happening in medical billing.

Another great solution is through integration with SharePoint. While SharePoint helps in business management and provides customers and business partners the flexible and scalable framework in putting together production case management solutions, this can also happen in developing the processes in medical laboratories. The incorporated capture and storage feature in particular enables to leverage the SharePoint foundation at no extra charge while still giving documents their useful capabilities. Consequently, this offers cost-effective and lean framework for the best return on investment yet the lowest TCO for any workflow or business process management solution.

One example of a workflow that combines with SharePoint for people process solutions together with LIMS is e5 Workflow. Based on studies, this is among those that have been utilized by the Regional Medical Laboratory, a pathology laboratory in the Oklahoma City United States. It's been said that with SharePoint medical billing solutions and adaptive case management, productivity improvement has grown by 50% in addition to SLA compliance improvement of 66%.

With e5, each laboratory can be able to scan the requisition where each contains a barcode for increased security purposes as well as its contents prioritizing the requisition of its ideal representatives' work queue. The staff accesses the digital requisition for viewing and inputting billing information into the laboratory's billing system. Ultimately, requisitions will be saved in a digital document storage system for protected access.




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