GE Healthcare

CoxHealth

CoxHealth, based in Springfield, Missouri, which has been recognized as a Top 100 integrated health system by Hospitals & Health Networks magazine, is comprised of all major specialties and subspecialties. Care is provided through a network of clinics, physician practices, and three owned hospitals.

To serve a growing patient population, CoxHealth is continually making strategic investments in capital expansions, new clinical services, and additional providers and administrative staff. With this growth and change has come the need to more broadly apply technology that enhances business decision-making and provides for better practice management, while enabling providers to continue to deliver the best care possible.

In particular, CoxHealth required tighter integration and communication between its employed providers and those with whom it contracts, including the more than 100 physicians within the Ferrell-Duncan Clinic multi-specialty group. Specifically, the organization needed to reduce the time and effort involved in maintaining and sharing patient records. Today, the organization is using Centricity® Electronic Medical Record (EMR) from GE Healthcare in its hospitals and 38 clinics. In addition it is moving rapidly to deploy the full set of features available in GE Healthcare’s Centricity Group Management system for revenue optimization.

In 2003, to capitalize on the capabilities of Centricity EMR, CoxHealth took the critical step of merging its clinics’ individual clinical databases into a single integrated database. This has, in effect, created a single chart for every patient, and the ability to use Centricity for:

• Chart access from any location in the CoxHealth system
• Accessing clinical protocols at the point of care
• Electronic ordering of all diagnostic procedures and prescriptions
• Outcomes analysis, including measurement of physician performance against national standards

Using Centricity, CoxHealth has become a virtually paperless entity. This has led to a variety of benefits ranging from cost reductions to staff and clinician productivity improvements.

Results

• One clinic in the CoxHealth network, Cox Family Medicine Associates, has seen the following results:
  • Centricity EMR eliminates the need to handle more than 150 charts each day and the dedication of two full time employees.
  • Patient phone calls that would typically require a chart pull, delivery to the physician’s desk for a manual note entry and physical re-filing, are now handled almost instantly by email to nurses, with subsequent online documentation and orders by physicians.
  • Multiple users can work in a patient’s chart at the same time. Nurse and physician can enter their respective inputs simultaneously (e.g., vital signs and orders). This has increased the speed of workflow.
  • Charts required for quarterly audits can be pulled in seconds for every physician; this process would take five times as long in a paper-based environment.
  • Tests and procedures are ordered from within the EMR and are pre-populated with patient data, diagnosis and physician authorization, and electronically transmitted.
  • Nearly 80% of referrals are electronic. Specialists are armed with full information about a patient, including history, problems, medications and lab results.
• Other innovations at CoxHealth include:
  • Records Sharing –With Centricity, records are universally available – at hospitals, physician offices, and their homes.
  • Patient Safety – Centricity presents Cox physicians with an accurate, readable medication list that is accessible from a single location in the record. It is continuously updated as drugs are added or removed. Further, it advises the physician when a prescribed drug combination is likely to produce adverse reactions, thus reducing unnecessary pharmacy call-backs and repeat documentation that would consume hours of physician, nurse and staff time.
  • Performance Measurement – The EMR’s reporting feature enables in-depth scorecarding on all providers. In minutes it’s possible to see how every clinician stacks up against HEDIS and ORYX1 benchmarks for patient actions taken across a spectrum of disease states. Having to do this manually would entail untold FTE time and cost.
  • Outcomes Analysis – Now a means of evaluating how patients do based on the care they are given, measured against nationally accepted care guidelines.
• Centricity Group Management has proven features for billing, scheduling, electronic data interchange, and more. Benefits include:
  • Scheduling – A key benefit of the tool is the ability to have charge information tied directly to an appointment. When a patient bill is created, three quarters of the fields already populated automatically from the appointment. This not only decreases data entry time, but makes for more accurate posting as well.
  • Collections – The system schedules the workload for collection staff by automatically pulling accounts that are past due into action queues.
  • An auto letters capability delivers high value by eliminating the need to generate collection letters manually. This capability saves between five to ten minutes per collection letter.
  • Centricity’s insurance sets capability enables CoxHealth to readily manage billing for patients with multiple coverage. The feature accommodates eight different payer types and automatically ties charges to the appropriate payer.

***Submitted by Jenn Francis, Public Relations, GE Healthcare IT, jennifer.n.francis@ge.com  

Published: January 26, 2009