Director Matt Onesko partners with clients to achieve top-performing metric success
Today’s electronic health record (EHR) market continues to expand its offerings of next generation, fully integrated platforms designed to enhance the clinical and patient experience. Yet, several EHR market shifts have become apparent over the last few years.
Historically, Epic and Cerner have offered comparable and competitive clinical applications (each have been the top two enterprise suite leaders, according to leading independent ranking service KLAS). Taking advantage of meaningful use requirements and their early entry into the integrated clinical and revenue cycle product space, a significant market trend continues towards Cerner and Epic as the two preeminent long-term EHR platforms:
It is worth noting that while Cerner Patient Accounting (built to integrate with the primary clinical application suite, Millennium PowerChart) is not as mature a platform as others in the market, it continues to improve as reported active implementation volumes grow year over year. According to the recently published 2018 KLAS Patient Accounting survey results, provider organizations are prioritizing the benefits of Cerner’s fully integrated solution rather than previous “best-in-breed” technology adoption approaches, which resulted in complex interfaces and bolt-ons. When functioning well, numerous value-add benefits exist that nonintegrated organizations cannot achieve. Just a few examples are:
However, there are many common EHR implementation challenges that can disrupt revenue cycle and financial metric success post go-live:
Any EHR implementation is a costly and potentially risky undertaking. Vendor implementation methodology needs to primarily focus on technical system build, which can lose sight of impacts to operational workflows. It is important to provide rigor and standards to supplement the implementation methodology, enabling consistent quality results. Several key risks within these vendor implementations exist:
An average performing EHR go-live does not guarantee success. Organizations can often see extended claim delays, revenue loss, and disruptions to cashflow performance. Health systems must aim to achieve top-performing metric results to realize holistic KPI improvement. In addition to comprehensive revenue cycle design, testing, and training, best practice go-live metric management focuses on performance of leading indicators that directly result in cash generation and quicker returns to cumulative payment baseline:
While these results may seem alarming, it is possible to achieve top-performing go-live metric results across the revenue cycle by focusing on these core strategies:
Leveraging these guidelines and best practices, our clients have achieved EHR implementation go-live successes, including: