Rural hospital streamlines operations and improves cash flow with Oracle Health
Montgomery County Memorial Hospital + Clinics replaces multiple systems with Oracle Health technology to enhance workflows, collaboration, and patient care.
“We really wanted to have one, unified system to streamline processes for our staff and to give our patients the best healthcare experience possible.”
County-owned and operated Montgomery County Memorial Hospital + Clinics takes pride in caring for the individual needs of all members of its community—whether they're family, friends, or neighbors. However, the Iowa-based organization wanted to move away from maintaining several disparate medical and billing systems to enhance collaboration and create efficiencies for business-office and front-line staff.
“I estimate we had anywhere from 14 to 17 different vendors that we were using, which meant different platforms and different integrations. We were trying to get all those pieces to communicate,” says Bryant Blay, chief financial officer at Montgomery County Memorial Hospital. “We really wanted to have one, unified system to streamline processes for our staff and to give our patients the best healthcare experience possible.”
On Oct. 12, 2020, Montgomery County Memorial implemented Oracle Health's electronic health record system, which included a clinically-driven revenue cycle. Despite the challenges of going live during the COVID-19 pandemic and switching many in-person events to virtual, the organization experienced success from the transition.
By moving to one system and removing paper charts, we freed up space for our business operations team to work through encounters and learn new workflows together. We’ve also been able to consolidate billing and coding teams that used to be separate, based on software for the clinic versus the hospital.
Through implementation, communication between the business operations staff and clinicians also improved. Before, the coding and admissions team would email providers when they had questions or needed more documentation to code an account. After engagement, providers and back-end staff were able to use the Message Center—where clinicians receive notifications and messages for patients—to route information, instead of hopping to different products.
Aside from better communication and collaboration, leaders feel the new system has led to less manual processes and improved charge capture.
“I believe our staff have been able to be more efficient because we're no longer tracking charges on sheets of paper and manually entering them into the system. As a result, I think we've seen an improvement in our charge capture,” says Blay. “The Oracle Health team also helped us identify anesthesia charges that we weren't capturing. I believe being able to net those thousands of charges has also played a part in helping with our metrics on the financial side.”
After the implementation, Montgomery County Memorial decreased its accounts receivable (AR) balance by over 5.5%[1] and its average discharge not final billed (DNFB) by 19.5%.[2]
Leaders in the clinical departments also believed that moving to one system and eliminating paper charts and processes helped clinicians as they provide health care for patients over time.
“Our providers no longer have to call the clinic down the hall to get information on a patient and their previous visits,” says Krystalle Fada, chief nurse executive. “We have that information at our fingertips and can see where the patient is within their care journey.”
Having a central system not only gives clinicians a more complete picture of a patient's health, but it also helps decrease medical errors, which can impact patient safety.
“Our previous pharmacy system didn't really speak to our other patient systems, so we had to use manual processes and handwritten orders to try and bridge that gap,” says Fada. “But with Oracle Health's system, everything talks. Our providers put in their orders and then the patient's wristband is scanned to help make sure the patient is getting the right medication at the right time. Because of this, I believe we've seen a dramatic reduction in medication errors.”
As Montgomery County Memorial Hospital looks to the future, the organization is excited about continuing to use cutting-edge technology to care for patients.
"We're really looking forward to continuing our strong partnership with Oracle Health. Oracle Health has been really good at making sure its updates contain the latest evidence-based practice and technology, which is super important to us as we continue to meet the needs of our patients,” says Fada.
1 Comparing the $11,734,296.30 baseline average A/R balance (from September 2018 to September 2020) to the $11,069,072.32 post implementation average A/R balance (from January 2022 to December 2022). Each value comes from the A/R as of the last day of the respective month. 2021 data was unavailable.
2 Comparing the $3,207,212.92 baseline DNFB average (from November 2019 to September 2020) to the $2,582,184.21 DNFB average post implementation (February 2022 to December 2022). 2021 data was unavailable.