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An electronic health record (EHR) implementation can disrupt many areas of hospital operations, and the effect on the revenue cycle in particular may pose significant financial risks. During this time, organizations often see their days in accounts receivable and denials increase while cash flow slows. However, when hospitals and health systems address risks to the revenue cycle prior to go-live and as part of EHR workflow, they can stay on track and maintain positive financial performance during the transition. With this in mind, participants in this HFMA Executive Roundtable, sponsored by RelayHealth Financial, share insights into how to mitigate financial risk when implementing an EHR.
Has your organization recently implemented or are you planning to implement a new EHR?
Teresa Handy: We started our enterprisewide system implementation in late 2010. At that time, we brought five hospitals online in less than a year, and we also rolled out physician billing with a big bang approach prior to our first hospital go-live.
Margaret Schuler: We have just gone live with seven hospitals, 343 physician practices, eight urgent care centers, several home health and hospice providers, and three large medical complexes that include freestanding emergency departments. We started in June 2014 and finished in November 2015.
Greg Meyers: We are in the midst of implementing a single solution that will replace our inpatient and ambulatory clinical programs, as well as the revenue cycle system that supports the hospital and physician practices. We recently brought up physician billing for 450 physicians and the ambulatory EHR for about a third of those physicians. The remaining physicians and four of our hospitals will go live over the next year. It will be late 2017 before we have completed the transition for all of our facilities.
Was a change in revenue cycle partners part of the process in considering EHR solutions?
Jane Berkebile: We made a strategic commitment to move from a best-of-breed approach to one systemwide solution as much as possible, and that meant replacing both our clinical and financial systems. Even though we had a high-functioning revenue cycle, we had 23 different bolt-on products that enabled the process. As we moved forward with the single vendor, our objective was to eliminate as many of the bolt-ons as we could;...