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In this business profile, Brad W. Playford, founder and CEO of AvaSure, discusses the value and benefits of virtual patient monitoring.
Tell us a little bit about your organization.
In 2009, AvaSure was an integrated business security solutions company based in Grand Rapids, Mich. That year, we found our future, launching the AvaSys TeleSitter Solution—a virtual patient engagement solution that allows remote monitoring of 12 or more patients on one large screen and the ability to intervene instantly via audio to prevent harm. Monitored patients have been deemed by the healthcare institution to be at risk of hurting themselves or others, and they therefore require continuous observation. The fixed and mobile versions of our room units are now found in hundreds of hospitals across the United States and around the world. As the company has grown, we’ve added a dedicated team of registered nurses who continue to refine a clinical education program that accompanies the technology, bringing patient monitoring and communication best practices to the field. Most recently, we began offering comparative data on utilization and outcomes.
What are the challenges your system addresses?
Within the acute care setting, there are many patients at risk of hurting themselves or others. These individuals may have an increased likelihood of falling, eloping, becoming violent, and so on. To prevent an adverse event, hospitals must closely monitor these high-risk patients. Typically, this means putting a trained staff person—a sitter—in the room 24/7. Although that approach is often ineffective in reducing risk, most hospitals are spending at least seven figures annually on sitters.
On the other hand, insufficient patient monitoring can result in costly problems. If an individual falls, for example, there are often serious injuries that require medical treatment, and, in some cases, there might be significant medical malpractice litigation exposure.
By using our continuous monitoring service, hospitals and health systems can keep an eye on multiple high-risk patients at the same time. Not only does this cut the costs of treating these patients, but our solution catches and prevents adverse events, helping organizations increase safety and quality as well.
How does your solution work?
There are three major components to the AvaSys solution: technology, clinical workflow, and data analytics.
From a technology standpoint, our system aggregates tele-sitter views of at-risk patients. A mobile or fixed device in the patient’s room sends images over the regular hospital network to a 40-inch video screen in a centralized location where a trained observer monitors multiple patients simultaneously—sometimes as many as 15 individuals. There are shifts of observers, so patients are continuously watched. A camera on each cart has pan, tilt, and zoom capability, allowing the observer to see anywhere in the room, including fine details, such as skin color changes, shallow breathing, and whether a patient’s pulse oximeter is still attached.
Through two-way audio, the observer vocally engages with the patient, and the patient can respond without having to touch anything. If the patient tries to do something he or she shouldn’t—like get out of bed on his or her own—the observer can intervene by saying, “Mrs. Smith, what are you doing?” or, “Hold it right there, I’m going to get somebody to help you.” If the patient is unresponsive to verbal direction, there is a STAT alarm that automatically cues the nursing staff to immediately go to the patient’s room.
When there is a language barrier, staff can use the solution’s pre-recorded statements that come in more than 200 languages. These include common phrases such as, “Stay in bed,” or, “I’m going to get your caregiver right away.”
In terms of clinical workflow, we make sure the hospital has the appropriate protocols in place to support the technology. Before implementing the solution, our clinical team determines how the hospital currently responds to these types of patients. The team then works with the hospital to create policies, procedures, and protocols that ensure reliable identification of patients who require watching, consistent patient-monitoring criteria, comprehensive observer job descriptions, accurate data collection, and so on.
We also provide robust monitor technician training. During implementation, we have clinicians on site to credential these staff. After go-live, we check in every 30 days. In those cases where a replacement observer is hired, hospitals can use our e-learning tool to get the individual up to speed. We also offer continuing education with courses related to geriatric sensitivity, verbal de-escalation, and how to respond to a patient who is at risk of self-harm.
Finally, we provide strong data analytics. The system includes a real-time dashboard that shows a variety of metrics, including, but not limited to, the current number of carts in use, verbal redirections, STAT alarms, and so on. In addition, we deliver a broader set of metrics that can drive performance improvement. Leaders can view comparative data by observer, unit, shift, patient condition, and so forth, analyzing how their staff and processes compare with similar organizations.
What advice would you offer to healthcare leaders when choosing among vendors?
Look for a company that has a wealth of experience. Virtual patient monitoring requires up-to-date technology and solid clinical support. You want a vendor that is an expert in all aspects of the process—and you want one that has a track record of partnering with the best. AvaSys is now deployed in half of U.S. News and World Report’s Honor Roll of the 20 best hospitals, including the top three.
You also want to select a vendor that can demonstrate financial results. For example, our clients can expect that for every $1 million spent on our system, they will see a return of $2 million to $4 million every year. We consider a variety of cost savings in calculating this ROI. First, there is the savings that comes from not having to hire sitters to watch patients. There is also the money saved in preventing negative events, such as falls or elopement, which can cause injury. Also, with our system, you can avoid litigation and CMS penalties for never events.
As healthcare organizations implement use of AvaSys into their day-to-day operations, what advice would you offer so they can best set themselves up for success?
Strong program leadership is key. Moving to this kind of system can be a bit disruptive because it is a departure from the typical approach. So, you need to have leaders whom people respect, believe in, and will follow, and these individuals must take responsibility for building enthusiasm and maintaining momentum. Once the decision is made to get this technology, leaders must be committed to getting the most out of it and stay involved in the work to ensure long-term success.
Are there any educational materials you would like to share to help healthcare providers in these efforts?
For more information about the AvaSys Telesitter Solution, go to our website at http://avasure.com. Upon request, we can provide a wealth of peer-reviewed research on our results.
HFMA is the nation’s leading membership organization for more than 40,000 healthcare financial management professionals. Business Profiles are funded through advertising with leading solution providers. Learn more.
Content for this Business Profile is supplied by AvaSure. This published piece is provided for advertisement purposes. HFMA does not endorse the published material or warrant or guarantee its accuracy. The statements and opinions of those profiled are those of the individual and not those of HFMA. References to commercial manufacturers, vendors, products, or services that appear do not constitute endorsement by HFMA.
Andrew Motz, assistant vice president, supply chain consulting at HealthTrust, discusses the value of a data-driven approach when procuring purchased services.
Jason Williams, vice president for strategy and business analytics, Change Healthcare, discusses the importance of technology and technology-enabled services in reinventing the revenue cycle.
Judson Ivy, president of Ensemble Health Partners, discusses the value of revenue cycle outsourcing and the importance of selecting the right partner.
Bill Slama and Ken Deakyne of Grant Thornton LLP Business Consulting and Technology and Technology Solutions Services discuss the importance of enterprise asset management.
Patient financial engagement is more challenging than ever – and more critical. With patient responsibility as a percentage of revenue on the rise, providers have seen their billing-related costs and accounts receivable levels increase. If increasing collection yield and reducing costs are a priority for your organization, the metrics outlined in this presentation will provide the framework you need to understand what’s working and what’s not, in order to guide your overall patient financial engagement initiatives and optimize results.
No two patients are the same. Each has a very personal healthcare experience, and each has distinct financial needs and preferences that have an impact on how, when and if they chose to pay their healthcare bill. It’s no longer effective to apply static billing techniques to solve the complex challenge of collecting balances from patients. The need to tailor financial conversations and payment options to individual needs and preferences is critical. This presentation provides 10 recommendations that will not only help you improve payment performance through a more tailored approach, but take control of rising collection costs.
This white paper, written by Apex Vice President of Solutions and Services, Carrie Romandine, discusses the importance of patient segmentation and messaging specifically related to the patient revenue cycle. Applying strategic messaging that is tailored to each patient type will not only better educate consumers on payment options specific to their billing needs, but it will maximize the amount collected before sending to collections. Further, targeted messaging should be applied across all points of patient interaction (i.e. point of service, customer service, patient statements) and analyzed regularly for maximized results.
This white paper, written by Apex President Patrick Maurer, discusses methods to increase patient adoption of online payments. Providers are now seeking ways to incrementally collect more payments due from patients as well as speeding up the rate of collections. This white paper shows why patient-centric approaches to online payment portals are important complements to traditional provider-centric approaches.
Increased electronic engagement between healthcare providers and patients provides significant opportunities for improving revenue cycle metrics and encouraging patients to access EHRs. This article, written by Apex Founder and CEO Brian Kueppers, explores a number of strategies to create synergy between patient billing, online payment portals and electronic health record (EHR) software to realize a high ROI in speed to payment, patient satisfaction and portal adoption for meaningful use.
Faced with a rising tide of bad debt, a large Southeastern healthcare system was seeing a sharp decline in net patient revenues. The need to improve collections was dire. By integrating critical tools and processes, the health system was able to increase online payments and improve its financial position. Taking a holistic approach increased overall collection yield by 10% while costs came down because the number of statements sent to patients fell by 10%, which equated to a $1.3M annualized improvement in patient cash over a six-month period. This case study explains how.
With the ICD10 deadline quickly approaching and daily responsibilities not slowing down, final preparations for October 1 require strategic prioritization and laser focus.
Read how Gwinnett Medical Center provides clear connections to financial information, offers multiple payment options for patients, and gives onsite staff the ability to collect payments at multiple points throughout the care process.
Read how Orlando Health was able to perform deeper dives into claims data to help the health system see claim rejections more quickly–even on the front end–and reduce A/R days.
To maintain fiscal fitness and boost patient satisfaction and loyalty, healthcare providers need visibility into when and how much they will be paid–by whom–and the ability to better navigate obstacles to payment. They need payment clarity. This whitepaper illuminates this concept that is winning fans at forward-thinking hospitals.
Financial services staff are always looking for ways to improve the verification, billing and collections processes, and Munson Healthcare is no different. Read about how they streamlined the billing process to produce cleaner bills on the front end and helped financial services staff collect more than $1 million in additional upfront annual revenue in one year.
Effective revenue cycle management can be a challenge for any hospital, but for smaller providers it is even tougher. Read how Wallace Thomson identified unreimbursed procedures, streamlined claims management, and improved its ability to determine charity eligibility.
Before launching an energy-efficiency initiative, it’s important to build a solid business case and understand the funding options and potential incentives that are available. Healthcare leaders should consider taking the steps outlined in the whitepaper to ease the process of gaining approval, piloting, implementing, and supporting sustainability projects. You will find that investing in sustainability and energy efficiency helps hospitals add cash to their bottom line. Discover how hospitals and health systems have various options for funding energy-efficient and renewable-energy initiatives, depending on their current financial structure and strategy.
Health care is a dynamic mergers and acquisitions market with numerous hospitals and health systems contemplating or pursuing formal arrangements with other entities. These relationships often pose a strategic benefit, such as enhancing competencies across the continuum, facilitating economies of scale, or giving the participants a competitive advantage in a crowded market. Underpinning any profitable acquisition is a robust capital planning strategy that ensures an organization reserves sufficient funds and efficiently onboards partners that advance the enterprise mission and values.
The success of healthcare mergers, acquisitions, and other affiliations is predicated in part on available capital, and the need for and sources of funding are considerations present throughout the partnering process, from choosing a partner to evaluating an arrangement’s capital needs to selecting an integration model to finding the right money source to finance the deal. This whitepaper offers several strategies that health system leaders have used to assess and manage capital needs for their growing networks.
Announcements from several commercial payers and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) early in 2015 around increased efforts to form value-based contracts with providers seemed to point to an impending rise in risk-based contracting. Rather than wait for disruption from the outside in, health care providers are now making inroads on collaborating with payers on various risk-based contracting models to increase the value of health care from within.
Yuma Regional Medical Center (YRMC) is a not-for-profit hospital serving a population of roughly 200,000 in Yuma and the surrounding communities. Before becoming a ZirMed client, Yuma was attempting to manually monitor hundreds of thousands of charges which led to significant charge capture leakage. Learn how Yuma & ZirMed worked together to address underlying collections issues at the front end, thus increasing Yuma’s overall bottom line.
Kindred Hospital Rehabilitation Services works with partners to audit the market and the facility’s role in that market to identify opportunities for improvement. This approach leads to successes; Kindred’s clinical rehab and management expertise complements our partners’ strengths. Every facility and challenge is unique, and requires a full objective analysis.
As the critical link between patient care and reimbursement, health information enables more complete and accurate revenue capture. This 5-Minute White Paper Briefing shares how to achieve cost-effective revenue integrity by your optimizing HIM systems.
Speedier cash flow starts with better CDI and coding. This 5-Minute White Paper Briefing explains how providers can improve vital measures of technical and business performance to accelerate cash flow.
Qualified coders are getting harder to come by, and even the most seasoned professional can struggle with the complexity of ICD-10. This 5-Minute White Paper Briefing explains how partnerships can help improve coding and other key RCM operations potentially at a cost savings.
The point of managing your revenue cycle isn’t just to improve revenue and cash flow. It’s to do those things effectively by consistently following best practices— while spending as little time, money, and energy on them as possible.
How Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford increased payments received within 45 days by 20% and reduced paper submission claims by 70% by using ZirMed solutions.
The reasons claims are denied are so varied that managing denials can feel like chasing a thousand different tails. This situation is not surprising given that a hypothetical denial rate of just 5 percent translates to tens of thousands of denied claims per year for large hospitals—where real‐world denial rates often range from 12 to 22 percent. Read about how predictive modeling can detect meaningful correlations across claims denials data.
Emergency Mobile Health Care (EMHC) was founded to be and remains an exclusively locally owned and operated emergency medical service organization; today EMHC serves a population of more than a million people in and around Memphis, answering 75,000 calls each year.
Since the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) introduction, CMS has paid more than $100 million in bonus payments to participants. However, these bonuses ended in 2015; providers who successfully meet the reporting requirements in 2016 will avoid the 2% negative payment adjustment in 2018, so now is the time to act! Included in this whitepaper are implications of increasing patient responsibility, collections best practices, and collections and internal control solutions.
Getting paid what your physician deserves—that’s the goal of every biller. Yet even for the best billers, achieving that success can be elusive when denials stand in the way of success, presenting challenges at every turn. Denials aren’t going away, but you can learn techniques to manage and even prevent them.Join practice management expert Elizabeth W. Woodcock, MBA, FACMPE, CPC, to: Discover methods to translate denial data into business intelligence to improve your bottom line, determine staff productivity benchmarks for billers, and recognize common mistakes in denial management.
Physician practices must improve organizational efficiency to compete in this era of reduced reimbursement and escalating administrative costs.
Many healthcare organizations are pursuing next-generation health information systems solutions. Learn more about Navigant's work with University of Michigan Health System.
The proper implementation of healthcare information technology systems is crucial to an organization’s financial health.
As value-based payment models evolve, providers are challenged to maintain superior clinical outcomes while controlling costs.
Read more about factors contributing to the changes in the post-acute marketplace and what it means for manufacturers, physicians, clinicians, patients, and post-acute facilities as they anticipate the transition to the second curve.
HSG helped the physicians and executives of St. Claire Regional in Morehead, Kentucky, define their shared vision for how the group would evolve over the next decade. As well as, develop the strategic and operational priorities which refocused and accelerated the group’s evolution.
The client was a nine-hospital health system with 14 clinics serving communities in a multi-state market with very limited access to care, poor economic conditions, high unemployment, and a heavy Medicare/Medicaid/uninsured payer mix. In most of these communities, the system was the sole source of care. Though the clinics were of substantial size (they employed 98 physicians) and comprised of multiple specialists, the physicians functioned as individuals and the practices lacked any real group culture.
Clinical integration can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be, as this four-step road map for developing a CIN proves. Does it have to cost millions to initiate a clinical integration strategy? Contrary to popular belief, we have clients who have generated substantial shared savings and a significant ROI over time, without massive investments. Yes, some financial capital is required for resources the CIN providers can’t bring to the table themselves. But the size of that investment can be miniscule relative to the value it produces: improved outcomes and documentation for payers.
Today’s concerns about physician compensation are the result of the changing healthcare environment. The transition to value is slow, but finally becoming a reality. Proactive hospitals want to ensure that provider incentives are properly aligned with ever-increasing value-based demands. This report focuses on the three big questions HSG receives about adding value to physician compensation; Why are organizations redesigning their provider compensation plans? What elements and parameters must be part of successful compensation plans? How are organizations implementing compensation changes?
Revenue Cycle Management has become an even more complex issue with declining reimbursements, implementation of Electronic Health Records, evolving local carrier determinations (LCD), and payer credentialing [The emphasis on healthcare fraud, abuse and compliance has increased the importance of accuracy of data reporting and claims filing). The efficiency of a medical practice’s billing operations has critical impact on the financial performance. In many cases, patient billings are the primary revenue source that pays staff salaries, provider compensation and overhead operating cost. Inefficiencies or inaccurate billing will contribute to operating losses.
This publication identifies and outlines the necessary characteristics of a fully-functioning clinically integrated network (CIN). What it doesn’t do is detail how hospitals and providers can participate in the value-based care environment during the development process. One common misconception is that the CIN can’t do anything significant until it has obtained the FTC’s “clinically integrated” stamp of approval. While the network must satisfy the FTC’s definition of clinical integration before single signature contracting for FFS rates and contracts can legally start, hospitals and providers can enjoy three key benefits during the development process.
Nearly half of all Medicare beneficiaries treated in the hospital will need post-acute care services after discharge. For these patients, a stay in an inpatient rehabilitation facility, skilled nursing facility or other post-acute care setting comes between hospital and home.
With the proper process, tools, and feedback mechanisms in place, budgeting can be a valuable exercise for organizations while helping hold organizational leaders accountable. Having a proper monthly variance review process is one of the most critical factors in creating a more efficient and accurate budget. Monthly variance reporting puts parameters around what is to be expected during the upcoming budget entry process.
Managing the cost of patient care is the top strategic priority of most hospital CFOs today. As healthcare shifts to more data-driven decision making, having clear visibility into key volume, cost and profitability measures across clinical service lines is becoming increasingly important for both long-range and tactical planning activities. In turn, the cost accounting function in healthcare provider organizations is becoming an increasingly important and strategic function. This whitepaper includes five strategies for efficient and accurate cost accounting and service line analytics and keys to overcoming the associated challenges.
TRENDSETTER
Learn how Premier Inc. partners with health systems to reimagine workforce management, offering integrated data and advisory services to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and drive performance.
This article discusses how Imprivata is transforming the patient identification process, leveraging next-generation biometric solutions to ensure accuracy and improve efficiency.
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Drive down costs while improving quality in a reform environment.