Epiphany Healthcare Blog

Is the hospital you work for your home away from home?  Do you want your hospital to be the best it can be?  Do you see room for improvement but don’t know how to improve the efficiency of your hospital?

Most efficiency problems in any industry come down to one thing—communication.  The old saying, 'communication is the key to any good relationship,' also applies to the doctor/patient relationship.

If you can improve communication processes, you could cut costs while improving healthcare.  More fluid communication can reduce the time it takes for nurses and doctors to do their jobs.  More fluid communication allows doctors the ability to provide patients with more timely test results and care to reduce patients’ fear while waiting for the unknown.  

Here are three easy ways to streamline your hospital's communication and workflow.

Request a FREE Workflow Analysis

Make Your Hospital More Efficient by Simplifying Your Cardiology Workflow

Epiphany’s Cardio Server ECG Management System

Leave paper and the delays in its processing in the past.  Epiphany's Cardio Server ECG Management System has an intuitive user interface and is IT friendly.  It allows you to pull up ECG data and other diagnostic test results from anywhere in the hospital.  You can view ECGs from an iPhone or iPad or leverage our new Cardio Server Mobile Application.  This digital access eliminates the need for paper copies.  A doctor can easily pull up results at the patient’s bedside with a touch of a screen.

Make Your Hospital More Efficient by Simplifying Your Pulmonary Workflow

Pulmonary Server

Epiphany's Pulmonary Server allows users to access, view, edit, and electronically sign pulmonary studies and other diagnostic test data from anywhere in the hospital, office, or home.  It streamlines communications and hospital efficiency by saving time and reducing labor costs.  Just look what it did for the Cleveland Clinic.

Make Your Hospital More Efficient by Going to Paperless Rhythm Strips

Rhythm Strip Management

Epiphany's Rhythm Strip Management provides a solution to the labor-intensive challenges of patient monitoring strip management.  The application eliminates paper and the time it takes to cut it, scan it, file it, and read it.  Again, paper belongs in the past.  Anyone with access can pull up rhythm strips digitally and instantly.  This instant access reduces time and streamlines communication.

More timely communication makes hospitals more efficient.  Using these three, or even just one of these solutions, will streamline your hospital's communication.  Healthcare technology such as these applications will significantly improve the care-delivery experience for both the doctor and the patient.

Electrocardiograms are one of the most prolific examinations in a hospital. They may not be complicated to perform but the sheer number of them make ECGs a challenge to manage, particularly in hospitals working with paper-based ECGs.

We hear repetitive grievances from managers of paper-based departments. They typically state problems that relate to lost revenues from the ECGs as well as other study types. Problems include:

• Late physician over-reads that delay billing;
• Weekend/holiday orders and over-reads that get lost with weekend/holiday staff; and
• Human error in processing studies resulting in missed charges and duplicate billing.

Epiphany has solved these problems for dozens of formerly paper-based hospitals. Here is how it works:

• Configure Epiphany’s Cardio Server with orders, results, and billing modules;
• Orders come to Epiphany from your EHR and match to completed studies using patient ID, first name and last name;
• Completed studies promote to an unconfirmed queue for physicians to read;
• Physicians read from anywhere at any time versus only in the Cardiology Department;
• When they confirm the study, a result message automatically goes to the EHR along with a completion message that automatically goes to the billing system.

By having access to Cardio Server from anywhere, hospitals eliminate late physician over-reads; this happens daily and on weekends/holidays. By automatically linking orders to billing messages, human error in manual billing is eliminated; hospitals using Epiphany’s automated billing module no longer miss charges or double bill—they capture previously lost billing.

Additionally, we customize the billing workflow to your requirements. For instance, some of our customers want to separate technical from professional charges. We accomplish this by flexible triggers. In the separation instance, we trigger the technical charge once an order is linked to a study and promoted to the unconfirmed queue. The study is then read by the physician and confirmed. The physician’s confirmation triggers a second charge, the professional charge. (To learn more about Epiphany’s HL7 integration for automated billing, see our blog: “HL7 Integration Developments – Technical Charges, Professional Charges, and Credits.”)

On top of all the billing problems we solve, our formerly paper-based customers save money in the labor required to manually process ECGs. Many of them save enough money in the first year to pay for the entire system and enjoy the benefits of reduced labor costs forever. This also applies to other modality types, e.g., Holter, stress, PFT, and more. (See our blog: “Inefficient Paper Process Weighing You Down? Let us Analyze Your Workflow!”)

If you would like to improve efficiency and save money at your hospital or hospital system, contact Epiphany Healthcare today for a demonstration and see what Cardio Server can do for you!