Healthcare is changing: Ingenious Med is ready

Every day we are inundated with vast amounts of news concerning legislative changes in healthcare. It is evident that Washington and the American people expect significant healthcare legislation changes in the coming months and year. As stakeholders in the Healthcare Industry, we all must prepare for these government drives that continue to push hospitals to align with physicians in certain areas including: revenue cycle management, coding and documentation, quality patient care and proper patient handoff. Specific healthcare changes including increased scrutiny by Revenue Audit Contractors, payment bundling, Pay for Performance drives, liberation of Stark Rules, and the development of Accountable Care Organizations, will require hospitals and physicians to work more closely together in order to more effectively manage their groups and prosper in the new landscape. Ingenious Med (IM) is here to help physicians and hospitals succeed and thrive within the environment of growing uncertainty throughout the health care industry. IM's physician and hospital revenue alignment system assists both hospitals and physicians in meeting their respective goals.

Ingenious Med is an industry-leading web and mobile platform that provides point-of-care revenue automation for physicians in any mobile environment such as when rounding at the hospital, in the clinic, or in outpatient facilities, and even when at home. The Ingenious Med Suite is an all-inclusive solution consisting of automated charge capture, hospital and physician coding compliance and documentation tools, communication and pay for performance quality tools, and business intelligence reporting capabilities. These various tools are a crucial part of meeting the upcoming challenges from healthcare legislation that will affect hospitals and physician practices.

Changes in Healthcare Legislation

Recovery Audit Contractors
One of the most recent significant changes in healthcare has been the introduction of "recovery audit contractors" (RAC) as a way of assuring that proper payments are made for services rendered. RACs are given incentives for finding and recouping improper overpayments to providers of Medicare services. Based on the success of the RACs trial recovery period, they are now being expanded across all regions of the U.S. What does this mean for physicians? Many providers feel that the increased demands of accurate records documentation will be too difficult to handle and that the RACs may be incentivized to be overly strict with their audits. How can IM help? Education is the key. Coding and Compliance tools such as IM MasterCoder - in conjunction with IM's two-tiered code validation system - enable physicians to code their patient encounters accurately and at the point of care, collecting additional supporting data for decisions, while constantly educating them on proper documentation and providing real-time feedback.

Bundling
Hospital Acute and Post Acute Care Bundling is driving a focus on minimizing costs through decreasing readmissions and improving communication among care providers. Patient care and handoff from the hospital to post-acute settings will have a major effect on reimbursements for both the hospital and physicians. In addition to capture of provider productivity data, IM Practice Manager has processes and tools to facilitate and improve staff communication while optimizing patient handoff/transition and fulfilling JCAHO requirements for electronic sign out and peer-to-peer communication. The IM communication suite is designed to streamline communications between physicians and their colleagues, administrators, billers, patients, and primary care physicians. Communication tools provide mobile physicians with chat, messaging and cross cover capabilities, which enable physicians to disseminate critical practice and clinical information to each other in real-time. This suite serves as the communications center for all of the sites that each physician rounds at. Frequently used Web links, practice templates and documents can be stored on the IM Practice Manager Home Page for easy access. The Cross Cover sheet allows easy and rapid entry of pertinent patient information that contributes to easier and more efficient patient care and handoff. Upon arrival, each physician has a clear view of all previous encounters with the patients they are seeing. In addition, IM's Discharge Summary provides physicians with a brief discharge summary for each patient. This information aids in physician-to-physician communication and, therefore, fluidity of care.

Pay for Performance Initiatives
Pay for Performance drives such as the Physician Quality Reporting Initiative (PQRI) and hospitals' focus on specific core measures will continue to be implemented and possibly even mandated. Ingenious Med's industry-unique IM Quality module enables physicians and practice administrators to document, capture, track, and submit quality performance metrics. IM Quality was created to help clinicians perform PQRI quality measure and core measure data collection and reporting with as little practice resource allocation and workflow interruption as possible. In addition to the short-term financial benefits of earning up to a 2% reimbursement (previously 1.5%), physicians and practices that track quality performance can enhance revenues, improve clinical care, and prove practice value to hospitals, payers and patients. The mobile version of IM Quality now enables physicians to further capture quality data at the point-of-care.

Liberation of Stark Rules and allowances for gain sharing relationships
Government legislation continues to encourage waivers in the Stark Rules in order to incent physicians and hospitals to collaborate and improve patient care quality. Accountable Care Organizations are also being evaluated to drive quality of care and cost saving initiatives. The relaxation of Stark Rules for improved care quality will affect the relationship between physicians and hospitals and increase the demand for a systemic alignment. In order for quality care goals to be met, there will be a strong need for a system that can track data before AND after the drive has started. Ingenious Med stores work and quality data for reporting analysis and practice performance benchmarking. As government legislation defines the metrics for the industry, Ingenious Med will be the scorekeeper that tracks and measures improved performance and productivity.

Bridging the gap between physicians and hospitals:

With all of the above environmental changes, physicians, hospitals, and payers are beginning to align closely. As a result, physicians and hospitals need tools to help physician practices prove and measure their value, while monitoring and managing ongoing performance. In order to face the changes that healthcare will undergo, hospitals and physicians must first be able to evaluate how effectively their practice is working. IM Business Intelligence tools enable physicians and administrators to measure, view and analyze physician and practice performance data in real-time. IM Practice Manager aggregates billing and performance data across multiple sites, enabling practices to prove their value to their hospitals, as well as to optimize physician and practice performance in the areas of productivity, staffing, quality, resource utilization and coding compliance.

A solution for physicians on the go

The migration to automated processes in the healthcare industry is progressing, and physicians are increasingly adopting ways to utilize mobile devices for their revenue and quality-of-care capture. Ingenious Med provides a software solution that is accessible through Internet-enabled mobile devices, hospital workstations, laptops, and mobile PCs. We recognize that physicians round in multiple facilities and need a way to manage their patients in one effective environment. Ingenious Med gives physicians the capability of maintaining their patients and data under one Internet-accessible platform.

A Proven Solution

As a myriad of technology solutions proliferate across the healthcare industry, it can be difficult to decide which technology is most effective. If you are interested in implementing a technology that will allow you to align your physicians with your hospital's incentives, Ingenious Med can help.

Ingenious Med's all-inclusive software solution has proven to be:

Easy to use by physicians
If the physicians won't use it, what's the point? Introduction of new technology can sometimes be overwhelming for a staff accustomed to conducting business in a particular way. Ingenious Med has an extremely high adoption rate and users can be trained and begin using our software in the same day. And the mobile capabilities of our web-based solution allow for physicians to use the same software everywhere that they go.

Proven High Return on Investment
Ingenious Med typically increases Net collections by $25,000 to $35,000 per FTE annually.

Easy to roll-out
You should be able to start realizing benefits and ROI quickly. Ingenious Med only takes a few weeks to implement. In most cases, implementation only requires minimal time and resources from your IT department.

A Powerful Set of Practice Management Tools
Once you're up and running, Ingenious Med provides real-time business intelligence tools that give you access to all of the information you need to make sure you are maximizing the revenue opportunities available to you. Reports give executives, administrators and physicians access to information detailing demographics of the populations you serve, census trends, physician to physician coding trends, group and physician productivity, practice performance metrics like length-of-stay (group and individual) and readmission rates, and more. Ingenious Med's Business Intelligence tools give you full visibility into your practice, in real-time, giving you the information you need to strategize for growth and practice optimization.

Created by active industry professionals
Ingenious Med was started in 1999 by practicing physicians, and has since evolved to be an industry-leading technology. Our product design continues to be driven by both our physician founders, customers and our clinical advisory board, which consists of physicians and other healthcare leaders. Ingenious Med believes in the philosophy of rapid development, and we align our development projects with customers' needs and industry demands.

IM Practice Manager is fast and easy to implement and works as a stand-alone solution or closely integrated with existing EMR and Hospital Information Systems to help maximize the capabilities of your organization. With ever-changing healthcare legislation, Ingenious Med is positioned to significantly help both physicians and hospitals navigate the demands enforced through new legislation yet remain profitable with improved quality of care.

For more information, please visit us on the web at www.IngeniousMed.com or contact us directly at info@ingeniousmed.com.