BACKGROUND: Bringing ROI In-House
When Florida Hospital went live on an electronic health record (EHR) system in 2007, they were outsourcing the entire release of information (ROI) process. A year later, they decided to centralize the health information management (HIM) department function. With the use of an EHR, the idea of bringing the ROI process in-house and becoming a revenue generating department as a result was very appealing.
CHALLENGES: Delivering, Invoicing, Collecting Medical Records
During the evaluation process of centralizing the ROI function, Florida Hospital realized they could easily manage the front-end processes of ROI, but were worried it would be a huge challenge for the back-end process of delivering, invoicing, and collecting state regulated rates for medical records.
“We knew we could produce the copies of the records and validate the authorizations; however, no one really wanted to manage the whole invoicing aspect of ROI,” says Margaret Verity, administrative director of health information management, Florida Hospital. Since invoicing and collecting on invoices, as well as maintaining the fees allowed by regulations, Florida Hospital knew an in-source ROI model would be challenging.
SOLUTION: Ciox Health ROI Partner Model
With the Ciox Health ROI Partner model, Florida Hospital handles the front-end of the ROI process, where their staff provides the customer service and processes the request. Ciox handles the back-end process providing quality control, secure and confidential delivery of the requested records, invoicing, collection services, and tracking capabilities. Once the Florida Hospital HIM staff logs the requests, identifies the correct documents for release, and retrieves them from the EHR system, the records are uploaded electronically from the EHR to Ciox’s HIPAA-compliant and web-based ROI system. From there Ciox takes over and completes the remaining tasks for fulfillment from their centralized processing center with virtually no human interaction, reducing the risk of breaches and other HIPAA violations. This ROI model presents a huge time savings for the staff at Florida Hospital so they can focus on what matters most — quality patient interaction.
Implementing the ROI Partner model allows Florida Hospital to participate in revenue sharing while efficiently processing over 8,000 requests each month. With the HIPAA-compliant secure ROI process and requests tracking capabilities, Florida Hospital can optimize the use of HIM staff and increase their focus on customer service.
“Customer service is a huge initiative at Florida Hospital, and we’ve seen it significantly improve since we’ve began utilizing Ciox Health Partner ROI,” said Verity. “We create consistent processing and messaging across locations and provide superior customer service to our patients and requesters, allowing our staff to be more engaged in the patient experience. In addition, our ROI process remains HIPAA-compliant and confidential as a result of Ciox’s secure technology platform.” With over 8,000 medical record requests per month, Florida Hospital has the added benefit of earning revenue from billable medical record requests. “Even
though the revenue is not a huge amount, it’s able to supplement our efforts making the ROI Partner solution a perfect fit for our needs.”
