Client Profile:
A ten hospital, Mid-Atlantic health system with a large network of ambulatory clinics.
Challenge:
A long time client of i3 planned a phased implementation of the Epic Health Information System throughout their organization and required assistance organizing themselves, as well as executing on a plan, to ensure a smooth transition of their revenue cycle during this massive undertaking.
Solution:
i3 was engaged to provide strategic planning and hands-on project management to develop and execute a plan to successfully guide the cutover of our client’s revenue cycle thru the full implementation of the Epic Health Information System.
We began this engagement by creating a detailed roadmap that identified the tasks that would need to be completed by each key department to ensure at the time of go-live, they would be ready. By engaging representatives of each key department in a weekly forum where concerns, ideas and collaborative problem solving could occur, we guided them through the preparation process as well as held them accountable for all of the tasks that needed to be completed. An important aspect of preparation is being prepared for the unknown and to this end, we assisted these departments in creating remediation plans for potentially high impact issues that may have occurred during and immediately following their go-live. To finalize preparations, we facilitated the design of reports with key status indicators to allow each department to monitor and know when, and importantly which, remediation steps would need to be taken if the situation arose.
Simultaneously, we engaged these key departments in identifying their high risk areas as it relates to patient volumes, high dollar services, complex charging processes, non-standard billing requirements, and denial generation. These high risk areas were used to create detailed testing scenarios using their new Epic workflows in order to guide our client, end user teams in thorough end-to-end testing. By allowing users experience with the system we allowed them to identify gaps in these new workflows and communicate out those gaps to their management teams. Additionally, process, charging and billing variances were identified and documented so that build changes could be made prior to go-live. We managed the successfully remediation of all identified issues as well as testing of each solution to make sure the issues were truly resolved.
As these services were being performed, the additional need arose for project management support in assisting our client in working with a number of high risk clinical and non-clinical areas to rapidly identify their existing workflows and then design and develop new Epic registration, clinical and billing workflows.
We quickly organized user workflow sessions containing departmental leadership, front line workers and IT Epic application developers. By holding conclusive sessions focused on the right areas, critical decision making was able to take place in a short period of time. Documentation was created once complete, and these new workflows were integrated into the above end-to-end testing so unforeseen negative downstream impacts could be mitigated prior to go-live.
At the time of writing this case study, our client has successfully implemented four hospitals on Epic Health Information System using our processes and support with no significant impact to their Revenue Cycle.