It was almost as if Ira Brown was making house calls. Except on November 19, the official day of the athenahealth “Go-Live” with St. Vincent Medical Group in Indianapolis, Brown was checking in on his physicians – lots of them.
“What I’ve gathered from going around is the importance of just keeping a good attitude,” said Brown, a Director of Regional Operations with St. Vincent Medical Group. “The other key to success is training, training, training, making sure your staff goes to the training sessions.”
Brown was referring to physician and staff training tied to the implementation of athenahealth, Inc. – the cloud-based physician practice management (PPM), electronic health records (EHR) and patient communications systems being introduced to physician practices that are part of Ascension’s Health Ministries. St. Vincent was the first, and will be the largest ministry, to move to the platform.
“A group of us started well over 18 months ago looking at standardizing the opportunity with athenahealth,” said John Stewart, Senior Vice President, Ascension Physician Services.
That opportunity is the System-wide rollout of more streamlined front and back office systems, having all Ascension Health Ministries operating on an electronic health records platform and providing easy, online access to patients for all of their health appointments, records and payment information. “We actually looked at a couple of locations and chose Indianapolis. Its central business office had among the best performance metrics throughout Ascension. That was a key reason why we chose Indianapolis.”
In an unintentional nod to Indy’s legacy of breakneck speed, the implementation process, which normally takes four to six months, was compressed into just more than two months in Indy.
“Once that (deployment schedule) got established and we saw the value of the EHR services that athena offers, then we were really excited about that. … We kind of insisted that we’d roll out both the PPM and the EHR simultaneously because we wanted the advantages of the EHR,” said St. Vincent Chief Operating Officer Brad McNabb.
Approximately 1,000 physicians went live on November 19 on athenaCollector (as the PPM platform is called) and some 400 practices jumping on to athenaClinicals (the EHR component) on the same day. Even though this was the largest Go-Live in both Ascension’s and athenahealth’s history, the transition was remarkably smooth.
“Better than we expected,” McNabb said proudly at the end of day one. “And I’d be surprised if anybody on our team or the athena team didn’t agree with that. The amount of work that everyone did was absolutely incredible.”
St. Vincent’s Go-Live represents an important milestone in a strategic partnership that began with a major organizational announcement in July 2013. Ascension Clinical Holdings unveiled the new operating division, Ascension Physician Services, whose primary charter is to facilitate and support a standard physician practice management platform across all of Ascension’s Health Ministries.
In addition to the Ascension Physician Services announcement, athenahealth, a provider of cloud-based physician practice management, electronic health records and patient communications, was named as Ascension’s strategic vendor of choice. The partnership with athenahealth constitutes the first step in building an infrastructure for managing the health of individuals, defined populations and communities.
“It’s been really nice to work with athena because their whole business model is geared toward physician satisfaction, helping reduce the amount of time a doctor has to spend with a computer,” Stewart added. “This aligns perfectly with Ascension’s goals of being more person-centered. Rather than hampering the physician-patient relationship, the athena technology facilitates more one-to-one time between doctor and patient. This is invaluable.”
While patient care remains top-of-mind throughout Ascension, there are significant operational considerations as well. By standardizing all of these often disparate functions, everything from scheduling appointments to patient charting, each hour that providers and associates spend will be better utilized.
This underscores a concurrent goal: to offer employed and aligned physicians a robust menu of clinical and business applications to support their practices end-to-end. Operational efficiencies such as this enable Ascension to continue its Mission of serving all persons, with special attention to those who are poor and vulnerable.
“I think in order to improve the value proposition of healthcare, you really have to have standardization, not only to reduce the costs, but also to improve the quality of the care we’re providing,” Stewart said. “Equally important, you have to have metrics that you can measure and report on so your physicians can use that as a competitive way to improve care.”
Watch a video about the St. Vincent Go-Live.
Brief Glossary
- EHR – An electronic health record (EHR), also frequently referred to as an electronic medical record (EMR), is a digital version of a paper chart that contains all of a patient’s medical history from a healthcare organization. An EHR is used by providers for diagnosis and treatment.
- Patient Communications Platform – Typically a password-protected log-in portal on a hospital or physician’s website, through which an individual can access his or her personal health information, schedule appointments, check the status of lab and test results, check insurance reimbursements, and/or access or pay their medical bills and correspond with their provider.
- PPM – Physician practice management refers to the managing and optimizing of front- and back-office operations, such as patient scheduling and claim billing, with built-in reporting metrics to monitor and improve performance in all of those functions.
- Revenue cycle – The structure and time span from when a patient receives care to the time the physician’s office receives payment.
