To say the least, managing healthcare billing can be a major challenge for hospitals.
Insurance companies, including Medicare and Medicaid, each have their own complex documentation requirements and precise specifications as to which medical tests, procedures and medications are covered under which conditions.
To overcome this challenge, Midwest Health System centralized the billing function for all of its hospitals (MHS Data Center supports 29 rural hospitals in Kansas and Nebraska with a total of 650 acute care beds), but this created another challenge.
When a patient registers at one of the hospitals, his or her health insurance card must be compared to the card on file, if there is one. If necessary, a new copy must be created and stored. The problem: patients present their cards at the local hospital, but the remote central billing office needs immediate access to the information on those cards.
MHS Data Center had six requirements for a system that could store electronic images and make them instantly accessible over a network:
- The document management system had to be IBM i-based to be compatible with existing technology.
- It had to easily integrate with MedSeries4 to capture and store patient registration and insurance data.
- The desktop portion of the software had to be easy to install and use.
- The system needed to automate workflows to ensure clerks complied with insurance requirements.
- Scanning and indexing documents needed to be intuitive and require little training.
- Of course, the software needed to be HIPAA compliant with strong access control mechanisms.
MHS Data Center fulfilled all its requirements with WebDocs.
To read more about the implementation of WebDocs and how well it integrated with MHS Data Center’s existing technology, download the full case study.
