Optimize EHR Archives – Spark Health Partners

How to Prevent Burnout During an Electronic Healthcare Record Implementation

Andrew Ray, SVP, Operations Excellence + Innovation — Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:36:51 +0000

What you need to know

Converting to a new electronic healthcare record (EHR) can be a monumental task for any healthcare organization. The technical needs are complex, but the work leading up to this change to a new system can also be quite overwhelming. The meetings, the questions received and other unknown elements can lead to an unsettling feeling of not being sure if this is the right path — and each of these factors can lead to burnout for staff involved in an implementation.

The surprising hidden risk of staff burnout

Burnout stems from the pressure that comes with managing multiple priorities and added daily responsibilities. This pressure can build as we try to manage multiple tasks at once, and is caused by our inability to maintain a positive and fulfilling work/life balance. To help prevent exhaustion, it’s critical to find that correct balance.

Burnout can show up in various ways for your staff, including:

Overextension: Some staff will become quiet, focusing on the tasks at hand and decreasing their work/life balance by putting in more hours.
Distraction: Others may become overly emotional and unable to focus on meeting productivity goals.
Avoidance: Still others may become frustrated with the process, not wanting to participate and focusing only on the workflows with which they currently feel comfortable.

Some staff may experience all of these issues, which will eventually impact their performance and job satisfaction. This could lead to them moving on from the organization which, in turn, can have a ripple effect on the performance and satisfaction of other staff. In fact, losing a high-performing staff member due to burnout can lead leading to additional stress and fear throughout the workforce.

Solving for the unique pressures of an EHR implementation

During an EHR transition, the normal pressures leading to burnout can be magnified. Staff are often asked to juggle their daily responsibilities along with the additional work of learning and implementing a new system. Competing priorities often make it difficult for leaders to allocate the time needed to learn the best practices and workflows of the new system.

The long timeframes associated with EHR implementations also mean that the pressures of meeting daily operational needs while managing a new system can drag on for months or years. Stretching staff thin for so long often leads to burnout and increases risk of attrition during a critical time.

Luckily, there’s no need to go into an EHR implementation unprepared. Having a readiness program in place can help support and promote a smooth transition to the new EHR. Readiness plans can help prevent burnout by organizing and prioritizing critical tasks, providing necessary status updates and visibility to all project stakeholders, and ultimately ensuring there is minimal financial and operational disruption during implementation.

Ensuring support for technology + teams

The right partner can support a healthcare organization by working with operational leaders to complete project tasks. If followed, these tasks can help each functional area be successful in their daily activities. Readiness efforts might include the creation of:

A legacy record plan: Effectively managing and maintaining the legacy record supports the integrity of the future EHR and prevents compliance issues.
Document management plan: It’s critical to assess how a new medical record system will impact scanning and indexing. What will shift for the documentation migration process and for faxing? How should those pieces of the record that may remain on paper be managed?
Operational workflows: Identifying key and unique organizational workflows to ensure there is a plan that staff know, in order to continue to be efficient.

A readiness liaison can help build confidence with the new EHR by explaining how the new system will look and operate. The planning that a readiness liaison completes helps support the knowledge depth of the current subject matter experts. The right liaison will support a team by:

Validating access + workflows: Reviewing the build prior to going live ensures that expected workflows are in place for a smooth transition.
Testing: Helping to validate the build through expert review can identify areas that will hinder a successful go-live and remediate build fixes.
Reviewing training plan: Reviewing and providing guidance on training plans helps support the subject matter experts and trainers in communicating best practices.
Reviewing dashboard and reporting: During this stage, a liaison will help review productivity and overall revenue cycle health.
Putting a post go-live plan in place: Establishing daily go-live meetings to track issues and to share examples with the technical team helps ensure go-live issues are addressed in a timely manner.

Readiness liaisons offer wide-ranging support

A readiness liaison partner can support healthcare teams in a variety of functional areas, from Patient Access to Billing. Their key focus areas — and the support they contribute — might vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on the department’s needs, as illustrated below.

Health Information Management (HIM)

In Health Information Management, for example, a readiness liaison may focus on helping teams return to ideal benchmarks quickly after go-live, such as scanning within 24 hours, coding within 72 hours or achieving auto-coding of diagnostic accounts with an 80% success rate.

Additionally, readiness liaisons paired with HIM teams can support by reviewing:

Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI) process
Simple Visit Coding criteria
Dashboards and productivity reports

They’ll also work to identify and validate a full and accurate record for coding, release of information and retention, along with optimizing workflows for the Master Patient Index, chart corrections, document capture/scanning and deficiency tracking as well as provider notification.

Patient Access

Revenue Integrity

In order to support the revenue needs of an organization, readiness liaisons are prepared to review charging methodologies, the reconciliation process, the fee schedule or the markup table. They will help drive revenue by looking for missing charges, late charges and inefficient processes, and by ensuring charges meet compliance. In addition, they can ensure that all policies match new workflows once put into place and can facilitate continued departmental education.

These support partners offer a deep understanding of:

Charge interfaces and the systems that help support charging
Service lines and specialty department workflows
The CDM and supply chain connections, including the life cycle of supplies

Physician Revenue Cycle (PRC)

Readiness liaisons working with physician revenue cycle teams help refine and optimize workflows to uncover missing revenue, bridge gaps between providers and coders, and expedite efficient physician revenue management.

These liaisons can offer patient registration support; assist with prior authorizations, referrals and co-pay collection; help in understanding real-time eligibility (RTE) and ensure chargeable orders.

They also help ensure the longevity of each of these improvements through continued education for PRC staff, including charging and reconciliation workshops, as well as reconciling policies with new and existing workflows.

Billing

A readiness liaison engaged in supporting the Billing department might review and suggest improvements for customer service workflows, or set statement and payment plan parameters.

In addition to these responsibilities, readiness liaisons are trained to assist Billing to:

Validate single billing office (SBO) workflows
Review cash posting workflows (a cash management practice review)
Validate workflows for revenue recovery and underpayments
Work queue development and ownership for edits and stop bills
Review unbilled management workflows

They also work to review regional or state requirements, credit workflows or unique billing practices for provided services and specialty departments like research and transplant services. A readiness liaison might assess claim requirements, invoices, AR follow-up, denials management and audit and appeal processes.

In summary

Staff burnout is a very real risk during an EHR implementation, but the process isn’t one that an organization needs to undertake alone. Having a readiness program in place prior to implementation and working with an experienced partner that is trained and prepared to offer support during the process can go a long way toward ensuring a smooth transition to a new EHR.

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Ready to take the guesswork out of your EHR implementation? Spark Health Partners’ Epic Readiness Program provides a team of more than 60 Epic-certified subject matter experts to serve as readiness liaisons to bridge the gap between clinical, financial and revenue cycle teams to guide development and set-up of your new system. We focus on building efficiency, creating and validating workflows, and providing hands-on support during go-live.

Our team has supported clients with more than 40 Epic go-lives, helping organizations recover faster than the average Epic client. With experience across more than 75 different instances of Epic, we know the metrics health systems need to track to prevent disruption, and we build the dashboards needed to monitor every step of the process.

Connect with us today to ensure you’re maximizing the power of your new investment and setting your system up for future success.

The post How to Prevent Burnout During an Electronic Healthcare Record Implementation appeared first on Spark Health Partners.

3 Common Epic Implementation Mistakes Made by Hospitals

Andrew Ray, SVP, Operations Excellence + Innovation — Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:45:00 +0000

Imagine this scenario: Your go-live date for Epic is fast approaching. Your IT team is ready to flip the switch. From a project standpoint, everything is on schedule and moving along. Then a team member approaches you because they’re confused about the process and unhappy that they didn’t get to provide input.

Project readiness—the checklist of technical tasks leading up to implementing a new piece of technology—is only one aspect of an Epic implementation. Healthcare organizations also should consider their operational readiness and Epic optimization—ensuring their people are ready to interact with the new system. Below are three common ways healthcare organizations ignore operational readiness in their Epic implementation process.

1) Shoehorning Existing Processes Into the System Rather Than Designing New Processes

Healthcare organizations move to Epic because it allows them to break down historical silos and make the transfer of data more seamless. In order to make the system work in the way it was designed, processes should be created around system capabilities and the organization’s ideal future state. Consider this example: Physician orders in your legacy system may be used for clinical documentation purposes only, but in Epic, physician orders drive authorization workflows, inpatient-only notifications, referral-based scheduling, coding and charging workflows and other steps. A move to Epic necessitates looking at how existing processes need to change to work with the new system. The new processes could call for resources to be shifted from one department to another.

2) Equating Training + Education

Training is essential in any new software implementation. Users should know how to log in, advance screens and perform the basic functions of the system necessary for them to do their jobs. But education is something else entirely. Education helps explain why the system is set up the way it is and how each user’s work fits in with the bigger picture. Educating operational leaders and associates on the new system is key to getting the people onboard and supportive of the changes coming their way.

3) Leaving the Decision-making to the Leaders

Epic is designed to help bring down silos in clinical, financial, supply chain and revenue cycle departments, so healthcare organizations should bring together stakeholders early on in the conversion process to ensure everyone is on the same page. A strong cross-functional governance committee of both leaders and end users will help align departments on system terminology and other aspects of Epic implementation. An executive champion who is involved in the process can ensure a smooth change management process.

Epic Conversion + Optimization, Simplified.

With the Spark’s Epic optimization team, your organization is able to better pinpoint issues to prioritize improvement and maximize your investment. Our certified professionals have an average of 10+ years of experience as Epic operators so they know the gaps to look for, what optimization solutions to implement, and how to quickly get results. After Epic optimization for one client, the organization saw an 86% decrease in external claim errors. If you are considering Epic conversion or optimization for your healthcare organization, check out our Epic Optimization Guide.

These materials are for general informational purposes only. These materials do not, and are not intended to, constitute legal or compliance advice, and you should not act or refrain from acting based on any information provided in these materials. Please consult with your own legal counsel or compliance professional regards specific legal or compliance questions you have.

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The post 3 Common Epic Implementation Mistakes Made by Hospitals appeared first on Spark Health Partners.

Why Successful Epic Implementation Requires IT + RCM

Spark Health Partners — Mon, 29 Aug 2022 23:46:30 +0000

Hear from NCH’s CIO about the importance of IT and RCM partnership when converting to Epic. … Read More

The post Why Successful Epic Implementation Requires IT + RCM appeared first on Spark Health Partners.

26 Epic Workflows to Optimize Before Considering Bolt-Ons

Ryan Goodin — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 23:47:42 +0000

Make sure you’re leveraging the full power of existing Epic workflows to maximize your investment and improve financial performance. … Read More

The post 26 Epic Workflows to Optimize Before Considering Bolt-Ons appeared first on Spark Health Partners.