Covisint - Rowan Regional Medical Center

Situation

The case management team at Rowan Regional Medical Center wanted to cut costs and improve quality in the communication-intensive referral and utilization review process, which relied heavily on exchange of paper forms between the hospital, payers, nursing facilities and other post-acute healthcare providers. Implementing Covisint’s ProviderLink solution provided a centralized and far more efficient method of collecting information and communicating it to other providers, including audit trails, and at a remarkable cost savings, equivalent to a 136 percent return on investment.

The technology revolution is under way in healthcare administration. Rowan Regional Medical Center, a short-term acute care facility in Salisbury, North Carolina, is well ahead of the curve with its adoption of Covisint to provide electronic transmission of documents between the hospital and the post-acute facilities that also serve its patients. Rowan has 194 staffed beds and handles nearly 10,000 inpatients a year.

In many cases, these patients are discharged to skilled nursing facilities, HME providers, hospices, home healthcare providers or long-term acute care providers. These discharges produce an enormous load in terms of paperwork and processing. Paper forms, patient information and authorization forms were sent back and forth between Rowan and the various post-acute providers and payers.

Each month, on average, about 320 patients are referred to post-acute facilities, and each referral requires communication of an average of 18 pages of patient information. Such exchanges, handled through telephone and fax, were slow and involved many touch points. Lack of audit trail and communication history made communications with payers and post-acute facilities difficult to track. And the process was expensive. All told, the production costs alone for distributing referrals and utilization review information came to $33,000 a year.

Solution

The hospital's case management team worked diligently to expedite the communication-intense referral and utilization review process by implementing Covisint's ProviderLink solution. Now, all referral forms and supporting patient documents, whether paper-based or in an electronic medical record, are collected and communicated to post-acute providers through Covisint. Audit trails of all communication events are easily viewed,showing who received what information and when. Prior to implementation, transcribed documents were either faxed from the health system's health information management department, retrieved in person or copied from charts. With Covisint there is electronic transmission of transcribed documents from health information management to case management?simplifying inter-departmental communication flow while maintaining permanent electronic records. This has produced a considerable cost saving, including the elimination of costs associated with copying and mailing Medicaid required forms, distributing post-acute referrals and distributing referrals in 50- and 100-mile radiuses. The print shop costs for insurance review sheets were also zeroed out.

Better Health Lower Costs

With Covisint, Rowan has not only increased quality and reliability in communications—but realized a significant reduction in costs, to the point that the implementation paid for itself in less than a year. Rowan’s own estimate of the ROI on its Covisint investment is a phenomenal 136 percent, with a payback period of only 8.8 months. The improved quality of record-keeping and communication helps Rowan comply with privacy regulations and security rules set by the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Covisint provides an electronic audit trail of protected health information exchange and paper documents are not left lying around unattended. The new system makes staff interchange easier, because staff can fill in for each other by quickly bringing themselves up-todate on any case. With a complete audit trail, the appropriate staff are able to view—by patient—when and to whom information has been communicated.