Standing up a virtual business office EHR tips

Standing up a virtual business office

When most members of your organization's business office are working remotely, it is a challenge to ensure everyone is engaged and productive. You can take advantage of functionality in your EHR to help. Here are some tips that are unique to each EHR vendor.

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Epic tips for productivity monitoring

Although few productivity monitoring systems are perfect, the simple act of monitoring and providing a feedback loop to staff creates engagement and helps identify where training interventions may be necessary. If you aren’t yet leveraging the latest productivity monitoring functionality with Epic’s Radar User Scorecard dashboards, here are a few tips on potential options that utilize these simple tools:

Now: If enabled, managers can view the individual scorecards for each user they supervise for any applicable scorecard type that’s turned on in Epic. Some common scorecard dashboards include: Registration and Scheduling, Hospital Coding, Billing/Claims (focuses on unbilled A/R activity), Billing (focuses on outstanding A/R resolution activities).
Later: Scorecard dashboards can be grouped by users into a “Supervisor Scorecard” or by role types into “Combined Scorecards” that pull key metrics from multiple dashboard types (e.g., charge review metrics, claim edit metrics, and insurance follow-up metrics for coders who both code accounts and work coding-owned claim edits and denials).
Later: Create a weighted scoring methodology for all the activities your staff performs for a specialized productivity measure that is tailored to the uniqueness of your organization. For example, you can rank and weight activities based on whether the activity indicates an action was directly performed on an account or was delegated or deferred. These activities bring different levels of value and represent different levels of effort toward recovering payment timely.

If you have any questions about a virtual office, maintaining your revenue cycle, or any other health IT questions during the COVID-19 outbreak reach out to AskNordic@nordicwi.com to receive trusted advice at no cost.

Cerner tips for productivity monitoring

Identifying associates who are fatigued or merely struggling with a new environment can be hard without a monitoring system. Cerner clients have access to a rich transactional data set through their Lights On Network login. If you have not historically used the Lights On Network for your business office, here are a few tips on potential options that can help assess your team and workflows:

Now: When logged in, managers can view team dashboards and drill down to each user for a specific metric or benchmark. Lights On Network allows for near real-time monitoring of specific metrics. Some workflow metrics include activities related to charge capture, billings/claims edit, insurance follow-up, registration, scheduling, and coding metrics.
Later: Once the optimal workflow metrics are identified, dashboards can be grouped by users or by role types that pull key benchmarks (e.g., charge review, accounts receivable, and denial benchmarks)
Later: Create a visual scoring dashboard for the optimal workflows performed by your staff for a specific productivity outcome. Identifying variants and trends will help shed light on staff that may need help or training while highlighting the effectiveness of the workflows.

It is worth looking at your Lights On dashboards and assessing their current relevance or creating new dashboards that reflect the current environment. Quickly identifying opportunities to help your staff or optimize your workflows is paramount at this moment.