Patient Access

Experian Health announced it has acquired MyHealthDirect, a SaaS-based company specializing in digital coordination solutions in scheduling. We interviewed Jason Considine, Experian Health general manager of patient engagement and collections, to learn more about the acquisition, as well as opportunities arising in healthcare due to the rise in consumerism. What led to Experian’s interest in MyHealthDirect and the ultimate acquisition? We’ve had a relationship with MyHealthDirect for several years. Experian Health has been reselling the MyHealthDirect solution since 2017, and we’ve long recognized that their platform’s digital care coordination capabilities would be a great match with our existing solutions. MyHealthDirect's platform links patients with the right providers, offering online scheduling tools and referral coordination to ensure more timely access to care for patients. These solutions have proven to increase appointment and referral rates, improve call center efficiency, reduce no-shows and enhance the overall patient experience. By coupling this technology with our Experian data, we can ensure patients are getting the care they need in the management of chronic diseases and wellness programs. This acquisition evolves our core revenue cycle management capabilities and helps us make gains in the patient engagement space with all-new innovative offerings. You referenced “digital care coordination.” What does this mean and how does it apply to healthcare? Digital care coordination, as it applies to the MyHealthDirect suite, is comprised of self-scheduling, call center, referral coordination and automated outreach solutions, making it easier for people to access healthcare. By combining these scheduling solutions with Experian’s existing digital patient engagement solutions, we can deliver a seamless consumer-centered experience – from serving up an estimate, to streamlining the registration process, to providing consumers with the ability to pay their healthcare bills via multiple channels. Today’s healthcare consumer expects a turnkey, personalized, on-demand experience. When you think about the best engagements we all enjoy in retail, financial services, travel and entertainment, the expectation is that the healthcare experience should be no different. We need to arm consumers with the ability to streamline their healthcare and make it easier for them to access care. Why is the scheduling component so key in the overall patient journey today? Scheduling is the one of the very first steps of the care journey and booking an appointment has traditionally been a poor experience. Common frustrations include not being able to reach the provider, finding out that no appointments are available, or being forced into a time-consuming three-way call between the health plan and provider. Without fast and easy access, patients may not be able to get the care they need. When healthcare plans use technology to better connect patients to needed care, quality scores for patient experience rise and efficiencies are gained. Can you give us an example on how more automated approach to scheduling could lead to better health outcomes for the consumer? Sure. Take for instance an individual who is living with diabetes. It is important for this person to have regular check-ins with their provider to monitor their condition and adjust care plans accordingly. If this person is challenged to see their provider, or doesn’t have regular appointments booked, they could run the risk of becoming an unhealthy diabetic, being faced with additional health challenges. By tapping into digital appointment scheduling, a provider or payer could create an automated outreach plan to make the scheduling hassle-free. Appointments could be streamlined and scheduled directly on the phone via IVR or text, and appointment reminders can be delivered. How do you see providers responding to the rise in healthcare consumerism? It’s no secret that healthcare costs are rising, and consumers are increasingly bearing more of those costs. Providers, therefore, are telling us they need to deliver a better experience. They are asking for digital technologies to gain rich insights into consumer behavior and then adjusting their care delivery plans accordingly. They recognize that consumers have a choice on where to take their healthcare business, so they need to compete. In the case of scheduling, MyHealthDirect conducted some research and revealed 66% of patients would switch providers for more convenient access. In that same study, 77% of patients think the ability to book, change or cancel appointments online is important. My point? Those providers and payers investing in on-demand tools to interface with their consumers will win, simplifying many of the administrative tasks associated with healthcare. — Learn more about scheduling solutions.

Over the last twenty years, American hospitals have provided more than $620 billion of uncompensated care for cases where no payment was made by a patient or insurer. This includes financial assistance, where hospitals provide care at a reduced cost for those unable to cover their full bill, and bad debt, where patients have not applied for financial assistance and cannot or will not pay their bill. Despite extensions to Medicaid coverage under the Affordable Care Act, the number of uninsured people in the United States is still approaching 30 million. For these often-vulnerable populations, safety-net hospitals provide essential care regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. But safety-net hospitals are themselves under increasing financial pressure, experiencing more than double the uncompensated care costs of other acute hospitals. And when safety-net hospitals are closed down or struggle to meet demand, nearby hospitals must cover the shortfall in care. It’s a problem for everyone. A Kellogg Insight report found that when more people are uninsured, hospitals bear the cost by providing uncompensated care to the tune of $900 for each additional uninsured patient. Craig Garthwaite, Assistant Professor of Strategy, describes hospitals as “insurers of last resort”: “People are still going to the emergency room and they are still receiving treatment – so the cost is still there. When governments do not provide health insurance, hospitals must effectively provide it instead.” Hospitals might respond to the burden of uncompensated care in three ways: shifting the cost of care to other payers, cutting the cost of services to all patients and removing unprofitable services, or accepting lower total profit margins. All have the potential to damage quality of care as well as revenue and workflow. But beyond these major systemic responses, there are steps providers can take to reduce their risk of unpaid care and optimize their existing revenue framework. Protect your revenue by finding missing coverage quickly The new reimbursement landscape forces providers to manage more self-pay patients, with high-deductible health plans and health savings accounts. This puts a lot more responsibility and stress on patients themselves, who may not be able to afford their co-payments. Uncovering missed or undisclosed insurance coverage is also costly and time-consuming for providers. Regardless of ability to pay, if your patients are wrongly classified as uninsured or as having only one insurance option, you’re likely to lose revenue. As the financial risk of uncompensated care continues to grow, there are important questions for healthcare executives to consider: How do you decrease your accounts receivable balances and self-pay write-offs? How do you increase cash flow from re-billed claims? Are you missing any opportunities to bill additional payers for services? Are you identifying coverage for emergency department inpatients in time to meet your notice of admission requirements? The answers boil down to having the right processes in place to discover which patients can and cannot afford to pay, ideally before they go through the billing system. When you know this, you can move quickly to direct them to alternative sources of funding. How to find insurance coverage to avoid bad debt and charity write-offs An automated coverage discovery solution could help you identify patient accounts that don’t have sufficient insurance coverage, without the expense and hassle of engaging a collections agency. This proactive software integrates with your revenue cycle to search government and commercial payers automatically, so you can find insurance coverage that may have been missed or forgotten. It relies on multiple data sources and reliable demographic information to detect any inaccurate financial classifications and alternative coverage options. It can also shed light on product usage, productivity and financial results, which may help you fine tune your revenue cycle in other ways. Murry Ford, Director of Revenue at Grady Health System explains how Coverage Discovery allows his team to identify an accurate coverage match for patients without the patient having to share this information: “We use Coverage Discovery when the patient is admitted… the system automatically attaches the coverage to the patient’s account. No one has to get involved – it’s touchless, it’s seamless, and it’s worked really well for us. It’s brought in revenue that we would not have identified otherwise.” Every dollar found in this way is a dollar you’re not writing off to bad debt, or spending on unnecessary patient collections and admin. Mike Simms, Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Cone Health says: “Coverage Discovery is wonderful... After every admission, the next day we get a file which gives us insurance on those that we’ve missed. We can add that insurance to the patient account and bill the insurance company. In the end it helps us resolve accounts in a timely manner. Since we’ve been using Coverage Discovery, we’ve received over $3 million in payments, and that’s more than a 300% ROI.” An automated solution like this can be plugged in immediately to handle unresolved accounts for you, resulting in faster and more accurate collections, greater patient satisfaction, and improved staff workflow – ultimately reducing your organization’s risk of uncompensated care. Learn more about how Coverage Discovery Manager works.

The United States’ health system has become the most expensive in the developed world, and high administrative costs are a big factor. They account for more than 25 percent of spending on hospital care, making American healthcare administrative costs higher than any other country. Much of the problem comes from the complexities of payment. With public health programs, private insurers, and patients themselves all splitting the bill, it’s difficult for hospital administrators to determine who pays what in each situation. Especially during patient registration, they are bogged down by the time-consuming process of verifying patients’ eligibility for insurance and other programs. For these reasons, Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Hospital decided to focus on improving its patient registration process. The private nonprofit safety net hospital in South Los Angeles serves a high-need community and sees about 300 patients per day. Manually checking in all those people meant that MLKCH’s administrative team had an overwhelming workload. The hospital needed an integrated solution. Automation simplifies hospital patient registration The hospital’s staff was spending a significant amount of time checking different payer websites and making phone calls to determine each patient’s eligibility for insurance and various programs. Then, the benefits information had to be copied and pasted into the hospital’s non-integrated platform, which was another slow process that often resulted in inaccuracies. Quality assurance to find and correct those errors was a manual process, too, taking up more of the administrative team’s bandwidth. To free up resources and reduce errors, the hospital wanted to automate its verification processes, streamlining its registration, quality review, and more. MLKCH also needed its hospital patient registration software to work well with the Cerner system it already used. It decided to implement Experian Health’s eCare NEXT® platform. “We decided to use Experian Health’s software within Cerner versus a couple of the products we were looking at, at the same time, because it truly integrated within Cerner,” said Lori Westman, patient access manager at MLKCH. “When we presented this to our CFO, he liked the fact that it was integrated within Cerner; he didn't want us to have to go out to another third-party payer to pull information back. It's all about time and the time we can save on our registrations. That was the biggest selling point — the integration within Cerner and its seamless registrar on the back end. To the team, it's just another program they're working with in Cerner.” The software from Experian Health automates registration and financial clearance, among other patient access processes, which account for up to 80 percent of manual preregistration tasks. The system assesses patients quickly, replacing the information-gathering that staff has traditionally done. For MLKCH, which sees many returning patients, if a patient is already in the system at check-in, eCare NEXT pulls up his or her eligibility automatically when an administrator accesses the account. This saves several minutes, making it a notable patient registration process improvement. The system also eliminates a large portion of redundant tasks. When using the platform to check eligibility with one plan, eCare NEXT also searches for other applicable plans. For example, MLKCH treats a large Medicaid and managed care population, so checking a patient’s eligibility required visits to both the state’s and the health plan’s websites. But eCare NEXT will verify both automatically. Additionally, the fact that eCare NEXT integrated seamlessly with Cerner has improved the hospital’s patient registration process. Because the two platforms work together, patient data has become more accurate and the quality assurance process is less cumbersome. MLKCH was able to implement new QA standards after staff became familiar with the automation tool. The team also found that the enhanced data from eCare NEXT can shape user education and pinpoint areas for further improvements. And while there were some concerns that a new platform would take a long time to adopt, the rollout of the patient registration system was smoother than expected. The administrative team got a robust solution with exceptional support to ensure users have every resource they need. Ultimately, implementing an automation tool eliminated MLKCH’s most time-consuming registration tasks, allowing staff members to focus only on the tasks that needed their attention. This made their jobs easier and more efficient while also reducing training needs and improving compliance. The registration process became much faster. Automating preregistration tasks and eligibility verifications has also ensured MLKCH’s administrators have more accurate eligibility information. This integrates with Cerner to increase the quality of patient records. But the most important benefit of improving the patient registration process has been how it affects patients. These time savings get passed on to them in the form of quicker registration and less hassle proving eligibility. Using eCare NEXT has not only helped the hospital's administrators, but it has also allowed MLKCH to enhance patient service. Westman adds: “We get fewer denials because we're getting true verification data, and our patient volumes continue to increase. So the fact that we can take off two to three minutes, at least, on half of our registrations is speeding up the work for the team, and the turnaround time is much better for the patients.” Need to streamline your patient access department? Learn more or schedule a demo with us today.

This time last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and hospitals across the country weren’t quite ready for the flu season, which turned out to be the deadliest in 40 years. The flu and complications arising from it resulted in the deaths of more than 80,000 people.   Hospitals felt the brunt of the 2017-2018 epidemic early. Hospital and medical center staffs were forced to work overtime, setting up triage tents and treating flu patients in recovery rooms. Alabama declared a state of emergency, and doctors in California had to treat patients in hallways.   Experts predict a milder flu season this year, partly due to an updated flu vaccine that protects against H3N2, which was the severe strain that dominated last year’s flu season. While it's hopeful that this year’s flu season will be better, it's always a busy time for hospitals and providers, so they should be sure they're using the most efficient healthcare IT solutions to streamline their workflow.   Greater efficiency is key   When it comes to efficiency, hospitals should take a cue from Martin Luther King Jr. Community Hospital in Los Angeles, which collaborated with Experian Health to streamline patient registration and insurance verification.   Before the collaboration, MLKCH had to consult websites and make phone calls to confirm a patient's insurance eligibility, which was time-consuming. The hospital has a large Medicaid and managed care population, which means employees had to consult both a state website and a health plan website.   The hospital also had a high-traffic emergency department and limited front-line staff to handle the incoming flow of patients. Additionally, employees performed manual quality assurance, which is a time-consuming task.   Understanding its challenges, Experian Health was able to help the hospital streamline its system to improve efficiency in insurance verification through Coverage Discovery. It also helped the hospital improve patient registration with Registration QA, which has improved data quality and patient registration accuracy.   Since MLKCH integrated Coverage Discovery and Registration QA into Cerner, it has saved precious time when it comes to validating patient and payment information.   “We have a lot of returning patients to our emergency room, so once we check that patient in, their eligibility automatically runs in the background and our staff doesn’t have to go into another website to check their eligibility," said Lori Westman, patient access manager at MLKCH. “This has saved us two to three minutes of our registration time.”   “We average about 300 patients every 24 hours,” she continued. “Heading into flu season, they're expecting to hit a 400-per-day volume, so the fact that we can take off two to three minutes at least on half of our registrations is going to speed up the work for the team that much faster, to have a turnaround time that much better for more patients to come through.”   Managing the season   Only 42 percent of Americans got a flu vaccine last year — painfully shy of the CDC’s 70 percent target. Misconceptions and fears about the vaccination and its effectiveness can keep people from getting it, which only increases the spread of the flu.   Flu season is always going to be a busy time for healthcare providers. But finding ways to manage staff and resources and work more efficiently is going to help hospitals and other facilities better manage the busy season.   Learn more about Experian Health’s Patient Access solutions.

The world of healthcare, as everyone knows, can be complex. And in such a complicated system, solutions that simplify, automate, and reduce busywork can make a real difference in both patient satisfaction and workplace efficiency. Although healthcare is, by its nature, a high-touch field, there are several opportunities to allow automated software solutions to handle the basic processing tasks associated with patient management. When routine interactions with patients are automated, medical and administrative staff members can devote more of their time to the cases that need the most attention. Automated workflow solutions also simplify and reduce busywork to make a noticeable difference in patient satisfaction and workplace efficiency. Obviously, that outcome is desirable for all parties involved. It reduces costs, improves morale, and results in satisfied patients. In an ideal workflow environment, employees can personally attend to problem cases and resolve certain issues manually while an automated system handles the run-of-the-mill cases that cause administrative backlogs. Experian Health has worked hard to develop just such a system. We call it eCare NEXT®. Introducing eCare NEXT The eCare NEXT platform, using an approach called Touchless Processing™, is able to offload a number of key patient processes, including scheduling, preregistration, registration, and admissions. Touchless Processing is an exception-based system, meaning that it automatically flags patients who require manual follow-up with staffers. The system updates data in real time, and users can interact with it through either a work queue system or by responding to triggered alerts. Healthcare organizations using the system can automate up to 80 percent of human intervention in the patient management process — allowing healthcare staff to focus on larger, more important initiatives to improve the patient experience. And Touchless Processing doesn't just free up staff time; patients see immediate benefits as well. One of the biggest frustrations in a patient's experience is the inability to get a reliable estimate for how much a service will cost. The eCare NEXT system sorts through all the complex factors that affect healthcare pricing — which are often too complex for hospital billing departments to accurately estimate on their own — and quickly determines accurate cost estimates for both the patient and insurance. Efficiency results in lowered costs — and happier patients The eCare NEXT system cuts costs in other ways, too: by reducing staff training needs, by ensuring compliance, by enforcing transparency, and so on. The benefits of an automated patient management system can manifest themselves in all sorts of ways. Blessing Health System, based in Quincy, Illinois, implemented eCare NEXT and found that it reliably increased efficiency and accuracy in patient management: "Experian Health provided our staff with a reliable, real-time registration error-alerting process. Our overall registration accuracy rate has improved significantly since implementing eCare NEXT. We now have the tools we need to be successful in one user-friendly application." Blessing's employees found that eCare NEXT improved dashboard capabilities and made it easier to view critical data, including missed estimates and copays. It was a clear upgrade over Blessing's previous system, in which employees manually calculated patient estimates. After adopting eCare NEXT, Blessing's point of sale collections increased by over 80 percent, its clean claim rate increased from 63 percent to 90 percent, and denials went down by 27 percent. And because the process had become so much more accurate and efficient, the average number of days an account spent in accounts receivable decreased by 28 percent. There’s no need to labor under an outdated administrative system that's certain to cause backlogs, errors, and intense frustration for patients and staffers. By offloading patient management work to the eCare NEXT system, healthcare providers can do what they do best: help people. For more information, contact Experian Health or check out our Touchless Processing whitepaper.

As most doctors will say, healthcare is about helping patients, not making money. However, these two goals aren't as separate as some would assume. In order to help their patients, healthcare providers need to buy equipment, pay salaries, and spend money to maintain an effective, efficient customer experience. Revenue is what makes healthcare work, so preserving revenue should be a main priority for healthcare administrators. That's how Stacy Calvaruso, assistant vice president of patient services and revenue cycle at Louisiana Children's Medical Center (LCMC) Health, approaches her job. "Revenue preservation is a term that we use in our organization to talk about how we're going to ensure that we're maintaining all the money that we can possibly collect for the services that we provide for our community," Calvaruso says. "Everyone is being asked to do more with less, and patient access or the revenue cycle is no different than the clinical areas. We have to ensure that we're able to collect all the money and all the income that we generate as an organization so that we can put more money back into the community to provide more services to more patients." For help with revenue preservation, Calvaruso's team uses Experian Health's revenue cycle management tools. The full suite of Experian Health's revenue management products help LCMC Health facilitate patient access, manage contracts, process and submit claims, and streamline collections. Here's a closer look at how Experian Health approaches each stage of the revenue preservation process. Patient Access With 86 percent of leading medical practices seeing an increase in payer prior authorization, having accurate and comprehensive patient data is crucial to getting patients the treatment they need with fewer denials from insurers. Experian Health can help by verifying patient information at the point of service. From there, automated software coordinates patient data across all connected facilities so customers, doctors, and insurers are better informed about possible treatment options and how much they're likely to cost, eliminating any surprises in the payment or collections process. According to Calvaruso, a transparent process helps to prevent repeated work, which is a major cause of revenue loss. "Instead of calling a patient after the fact about a denial or incorrect insurance information, we're able to call them on the front end to let them know that we've verified their benefits, we know what the estimate of their out-of-pocket payment is going to be, we've talked to their doctor, and we're ready for them to come and have these services," she says. Experian Health's Patient Access tools make it quick and easy to find the right information and avoid miscommunications and delays that affect revenue preservation. Hospital staff will be grateful for the lightened workflow and improved outcomes for both customers and administrators. Contract Management One of the most common clogs in revenue collection comes from unclear contract management. Without the right data to analyze contract compliance, hospitals will struggle to get accurate payments from insurers and customers. Calvaruso says that one of the cornerstones of her revenue preservation philosophy is reducing the avoidable denials; Experian Health's contract management tools can analyze and audit contracts to ensure payer compliance and clarify anything that could lead to such a denial. Experian Health's contract management tools also provide patients with more accurate estimates of treatment costs. One recent survey of 54 hospitals found that getting a price estimate is a frustrating process for patients; another poll found that 46 percent of younger patients aren't paying their full bill at the point of service because they didn't have an accurate cost estimate. Having accurate contract management data can make a big difference at both the point of service and in later payment collections. Experian Health's contract management tools can not only increase the revenue a hospital collects, but they can also improve the financial experience and build better relationships with customers and insurers. Claims Everybody makes mistakes, but given the amount of stress that healthcare providers are under, it's more likely that they'll make mistakes on routine paperwork like claims forms, which can lead to the kind of rework that hospitals loathe and that eats away at revenue. On top of that, without a streamlined system in place, it's often unclear where the initial problem occurred, which means administrators can't correct the problem for next time. "We make sure we've done all the work in the beginning to prevent the rework," Calvaruso says. "One way we can do that is by using that lean process that assists us with identifying where we can improve." Experian Health's solutions helped Calvaruso develop that type of process. ClaimSource helps organizations prioritize the claims that need immediate attention, which saves time and reduces the number of tardy claim submissions. To avoid errors in the claims themselves, Experian Health's Claims Scrubber® makes sure clean claims are submitted the first time, eliminating the dreaded rework. Collections Submitting new claims after denials is aggravating, but bad debt write-offs are even more harmful to revenue preservation — it's money that the organization will never see, no matter how much more work is put in. The only way to ensure accurate collections is to minimize the risk of denial in the first place. As Calvaruso says, a key component of preserving revenue is moving back-office work to the front end. For collections, this means accurately verifying patient identity and analyzing litigation risks. Of course, not every situation can be accounted for, and there will always be issues with collections, Experian Health's collections solutions make it easier for organizations to prioritize their past-due accounts and pursue them effectively. No healthcare organization will ever receive 100 percent of the revenue it's due, but taking the right steps to preserve revenue can mitigate much of the loss and keep things running smoothly. With healthy revenue management, healthcare providers can better help the people who need them most.

Experian Health will be at HFMA ANI again this year–booth 1025–at the Venetian-Palazzo Sands Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kristen Simmons, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Innovation, Consumer Experience, and Marketing, with Experian Health, chatted with Joe Lavelle of IntrepidNOW to provide her insights on this year’s HFMA ANI conference, consumerism in healthcare and much more! Excerpt below: Experian Health booth activities  "[In our booth this year at HFMA ANI, we want to focus] around peer to peer learning and exchanges, so we are doing less selling and more engaging and more understanding. Understanding folks problems and helping to collectively arrive at solutions. We are doing a lot this year in terms of hands on demos of our solutions. We'll be showing some of our patient engagement products which include, self-service portals and mobile options for getting price estimates for applying for charity care, and setting up payment plans. Likewise, on the revenue cycle management side to automate orders with patient access functionality, contract management claims and collections, all those types of things that we do to improve efficiency and increase reimbursement for our clients. We'll also be showing off some of our identity management capabilities to match, manage, and protect patient identities so we can safe guard medical information and reduce risks for our clients. And on the care management side, our early support and sharing of post acute patient care information to help providers succeed as we all move forward into a value based paradigm." How Experian Health is addressing the need for consumerism in healthcare  "When it comes to consumerism, it's interesting when you're a company that has a lot of data and a lot of capabilities to say, 'Hey what can we do for people?' One of the things we really wanted to look at for our consumer approach, was to say, 'What is it that needs to be done?' We had some great hypotheses coming in and a lot of those were borne out but we actually undertook a big national study to take a look at what consumers biggest pain points were. It has a qualitative and a quantitative component. But, we basically looked at the entire healthcare journey so we weren't just asking them about the administrative and financial aspects of care, but also the clinical aspects. As we walked through the journey and were able to get a lot of quantitative data about all these different aspects of their healthcare journey, what actually turned out to be the most painful for the most people, were all the things around the financial equation. And, so clearly there can be pain in a clinical side, especially if you're unhealthy, you've got something chronic, you've got something terminal. There's all kinds of awful situations there but, really affecting almost everyone is a lot of the pain around the financial aspect of healthcare. So, we were able to look closely at some of those pain points and decide on some of the biggest ones that we wanted to tackle." How Experian Health is helping providers address financial pain points for patients and providers "Some of the big pain points for people is just the fact that you don't know what you're going to owe and as the patient portion of responsibility increases, understanding what you're going to be paying becomes more and more important to a consumer. So, understanding what I owe earlier, being transparent, and then helping me pay, those are some of the areas. And there are others but those are some of the absolute biggest pain points. And as you pointed out with some of our propensity to pay analytics, and some of the other capabilities that we have, we're able to help providers understand the financial situation patients are in much earlier in the process so they can get them to the right kind of funding sources. They can give them peace of mind so that they know what they're paying upfront, which may impact when they choose to go in for a major procedure or how they might want to save up for it or how they might want to access different funding sources." Listen to the full podcast

No two healthcare organizations are the same. Each has varied workflows that optimize efficacy and overall care for patients. That’s why healthcare software solutions should never be considered one-size-fits-all approaches. It isn’t fair, or terribly productive, to force healthcare organizations to adapt to new software. Rather, the healthcare software should adapt to them. At Experian Health, we’ll never supply a software product and then expect you to adjust workflows to suit it. Instead, we embed ourselves into your company to ensure we deeply understand your productivity needs and the reasons behind them. Only then can we tailor the solution we provide around you. It’s never too early to get it right The conversation about customizing your healthcare organization's solution begins before you even sign up. As soon as a solution interests you, we’ll start looking at how to tailor it to your unique needs. We’ll hold a meeting that includes subject matter experts and implementation leadership groups to uncover your greatest usability needs. Then, we’ll document those needs to better prepare whoever runs your project and ensure he or she has all the necessary information upfront. Then, gears start moving during the sales process. After choosing a solution, our team of experts works with members from every department in your organization to iron out the appropriate design and functionality details. We believe the people who will be using and relying on the solution every day should have a significant say in these details. However, we’ll do all the legwork of actually building and implementing the solution itself. By the time we’re ready to run internal tests to make sure the software works, members of every department will already know what to expect. Consequently, when they run user acceptance tests to check whether the solution fits into their workflows, they can accurately measure the solution’s performance against their input into its design. Afterward, we can iron out any hiccups they run into before initiating the organizationwide training and “go live” steps of the process. It’s never too late to make adjustments Our deep involvement in customizing your solution also begins before you select it, and it continues long after it's successfully implemented. We don’t go away just because we marked you as “live.” Instead, we understand that the healthcare industry is in constant flux and you might experience operational changes that warrant additional tinkering and tailoring to our solutions. We’ll stick around for a couple of days after going live, and we’ll stay available forever after, just in case. For example, if you purchase a new physician group six months after going live, you’ll face quite an uphill battle onboarding them all into your software system and, in turn, getting them up to speed. Because the group is new, you might face opposition to bringing on any change in general. In this case, you could use help facilitating the training and the adoption of your system into this new group, and that's where we step in. Additionally, what if this implementation requires a work queue structure that’s vastly different from yours? If the new group operates in a different area of the state, they might also have unique rules for some of their payers. These rules have to be incorporated into their system to accommodate the patient population. None of this, though, should fall solely on your shoulders. We can worry about the system's features so you can focus on the operational change management aspect. For our clients, we’re always on call. This devoted availability could range from six months or even six years. Whatever the situation, we know that you’ll eventually face circumstances that your software wasn’t originally designed to address. Instead of feeling stuck and frustrated, clients can find comfort in knowing we are here for every step of the process. And beyond tailoring your solution before implementing it, we also offer continued customization to help you tackle new circumstances without compromising workflow. Overall, here at Experian Health, we understand the pressures facing healthcare organizations today, and we are eager to be partners with you in securing the best solution for you needs and guiding you through the challenges ahead.

Seven years ago, Bill's healthcare group invested in a new health information system, and the dust still hasn’t quite settled. Like most health information system providers, Bill's vendor communicates mostly through the group’s IT leader. He has to pick and choose what updates and features are implemented, and the people who work with the system daily are expected to figure out how to make the most out of it. Fortunately, Bill and the head of IT are great pals. They eat lunch together, go out for after-work cocktails, and try to bridge the gap between their healthcare software vendor and the end users on the frontline. But Bill shouldn’t have to rely on that friendship for his healthcare team members to be able to do their jobs, and it shouldn't have taken seven years for the software to be properly integrated. Bill's not a real person, and his healthcare group is fictitious, but both are archetypes of the new healthcare landscape. Constant market changes and ongoing challenges have forced healthcare systems to partner more closely with medical software vendors. However, it’s challenging to find vendors that are willing to roll up their sleeves and work alongside the end users to design solutions that are tailored to their specific needs. At Experian Health, we want to make sure the first experience your team has with our health information system products is a positive one and that you all look forward to using them every day. Your group’s success is our top priority, and playing an active role in your onboarding process helps ensure that success. Providing health information systems and the knowledge to use them The problem with the archetype of Bill is that the end users in the group had to take on the tasks of learning and optimizing the system themselves. Trainers lacked the deep level of understanding needed to create enthusiasm about the system, and overall adoption lagged. By contrast, we know our solutions like the back of our hands, so it only makes sense for us to share that knowledge and collaborate to implement those solutions through medical software training. With years of experience under our belt working with healthcare organizations across the country, we’ve heard virtually every possible question end users ask. That experience gives us the flexibility to come up with on-the-fly solutions to challenges we haven’t thought of yet and suggest ways to optimize your group’s workflow with the system. We can offer shortcuts, tips, and tricks to make the system work more efficiently for your team. Collaborative onboarding lets our clients dive deeper into learning their new systems than they could by just reading predetermined lesson plans and FAQ lists. It helps us when we help you make the medical software training go smoother and ensure all end users actually want to use the product. In fact, for the first three to five months, Experian will be a physical presence at your organization, helping with change management and the onboarding process. Personalized, effective onboarding The process differs depending on how complex your organization is and what you’re installing, but typically, collaborative onboarding adheres to the following timeline: We start the process with a formal kickoff and demo to get executive leadership and everyone on the frontline up to speed. The demo lays out what the project will look like for the group and gives everyone the chance to start considering how to operationalize it for the organization. After the kickoff, our teams collaborate with specific subject matter experts and start digging into the nitty-gritty design and functionality detail work. We really stress the importance of operational input from people who will be champions for their specific areas, not just the IT teams. These champions need to communicate the details of the system’s design to their peers. When the design is complete, we do all of the heavy lifting to build the product, and then we conduct internal testing to make sure it works effectively. Next, we guide operational champions through user-acceptance testing to make sure the product meets their needs. User-acceptance testing occurs in a real-life, day-to-day setting so users can validate that it fits into their workflow. Once we iron out any changes warranted by the user-acceptance testing, we extend training into the larger workforce and officially go live. A month later, we come back and hold an optimization workshop to observe users in action. We can answer questions and provide suggestions on how to improve efficiency even further or make tweaks to improve user processes. With the rush to adopt faster and more efficient technology, many healthcare organizations have been left in the dust to figure out how to make new technology work best for them. At Experian Health, we stick around after software implementation to make sure your entire organization can hit the ground running. Our mission is to help the healthcare industry succeed in providing better, more comprehensive care to patients, and collaborative onboarding ensures our products do just that.