Improved departmental management
Imagine being able to quantify which departments are the most profitable and which are not.
Which insurance companies are generating the most/least revenue.
Which referring physicians are referring the most high dollar exams.
Discovering which techs are performing the most exams (and/or the exams with the greater standard times).
Determining average elapsed times for result turnaround, patient wait times, etc.
Discovering which radiologists are reading the most exams, and on and on.
Information is power and ignorance is lost profitability. RISynergy is like a powerful telescope in that you don’t know what you’re missing until you look through it. This gives you a good statistical handle on your department so that you can maximize your revenue and minimizing your expenses.
Maximize Reimbursement
For every exam ordered, there is an associated CPT code.
To get paid by Medicare and/or insurance companies, the CPT code has to be accompanied with an ICD reason code that is considered acceptable for that CPT code.
For example the CPT code for an Abdomen 2 View is 74020. An ICD code of 789.0 (Abdominal Pain Unspecific Site) is considered an appropriate reason while an ICD code of 924.20 (Contusion of foot) would not be considered appropriate and thus resulting in an unpaid claim.
A quality RIS should be able to force an appropriate ICD code to be specified for each CPT code. It should also produce a month-by-month statistical report showing the dollar volume of exams, by referring physician, for appropriate reasons vs. inappropriate reasons. If the amount of inappropriate exams is increasing over time, for a given referring physician, the facility needs to take corrective action by talking to the referring physician or by ceasing to take referrals from them.
Increase Capacity
With RISynergy your clinic can increase capacity with little-to-no additional staff.
By streamlining and optimizing department workflow through a workflow engine, patient wait times and result turnaround times can be minimized.
This is accomplished by systematically monitoring the patient’s progress, and their results, though each step along the way from patient arrival to result delivery to the referring physician.
Getting patients through the department quicker frees up personnel time to do more patients and generate more revenue.
Maximize patient satisfaction
Minimizing patient wait time is one of the key factors to maximizing patient satisfaction.
Since optimized workflow results in reduced patient wait times, patients are more likely to be satisfied.
On the other hand, patients who have excessive waits will most likely seek another facility for their next exam.
Increase physician goodwill
Since one of the benefits of optimizing department workflow is quicker result turnaround times, this translates into referring physicians being able to begin treatment of their patients quicker.
Most referring physicians have a choice of facilities to refer their patients to – offering the fastest result turnaround times will insure that you keep their referrals coming to your department and not losing them, and the associated dollars, to a competitor radiology department.
Focused Marketing
Focused marketing for your facility
A quality RIS, such as RISynergy, should be able to generate a management report that shows revenue by demographic groups.
Revenue by sex, by age group, by zip code, etc.
Running such report and recognizing where your strengths and weaknesses are is vital to maximizing your revenue.
Armed with such information, you can work to preserve your strong markets while focusing more attention on cultivating your weak markets.
Eliminate lost charges
Eliminating lost charges (charge reconciliation) requires that you reconcile exams that are ordered vs. the exams that are charged.
For example, a referring physician orders a Chest 2 View for their patient. After seeing the image, the radiologist decides to request an additional view. If the change order is not put into the RIS (changing the exam from a Chest 2 View to a Chest 3 View) the additional income can easily be lost.
Tightly integrated QC, Transcription and Radiologist Worklist modules help to insure that the additional charge is not lost. When the technologist goes to input data for that exam, it should be apparent that the exam in the system does not match the exam they performed. But, if the tech fails to notice, the reading radiologist then has the opportunity to notice.
If that too fails, the transcriptionist should notice that the exam ordered is not the exam they are typing. Lastly, when the radiologist approves the exam, he/she is given one more opportunity to catch the inconsistency. Thus, there are four checkpoints to catch and correct possible lost charges. This virtually eliminates the possibility of such lost income.
Minimize exposure to radiology lawsuits
Not being able to track patient radiation dosage, not being able to monitor critical results, not recording patient allergies can all lead to potential lawsuits.
Having the ability to do these things puts you in a position to better protect and defend your department.
One prevented lawsuit can save hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars for your facility.
An ounce of prevention, with a quality RIS like RISynergy, is worth a pound of cure!
Improve equipment asset management
By tracking the downtime and cost of repairs on all the imaging equipment, as the manager, you can be in a position to save the department significant money.
When the service contact renewal is coming up for a piece of equipment, with a quality RIS, you can run a report showing all the maintenance performed on that unit since the last preventive maintenance.
If the machine is relatively new and has been very reliable, you might opt to underwrite the cost of maintenance instead of spending high dollars on renewing the service contact. On the other hand, you might notice that a particular machine is increasingly down and thus less and less available to perform exams.
Such management reports can help you decide when to sunset a piece of equipment and purchase a new one.
Control patient rescheduling
Not properly conveying procedure prep information to the patient and lack of conflict checking represent the two major causes of unnecessary patient rescheduling.
A quality RIS will have a comprehensive exam prep database that allows different preps for different doctors. That’s because doctors often like their patients to be prepped differently. If a patient is not properly prepped when they arrive for their exam, they have to cancel and reschedule.
Canceling exams represents lost opportunity and lost revenue because that time slot is now wasted. If conflict checking is not performed by the RIS, during scheduling, the exam might also need to be canceled and rescheduled.
For example, if a patient comes in for an abdomen two view exam but they just had a barium enema yesterday at a branch location, the patient will still be full of barium and the resulting image will be loaded with artifacts that render the exam useless. This wastes the time of the patient, the techs, the transcriptionist and the radiologist and reduces patient satisfaction.
A quality RIS, such as RISynergy, will be able to utilize procedure preps and conflict checking.
Minimize exam repeats
With the prevalence of PACS systems today, exam repeats are not as common as they used to be with film but they still exist.
Being able to track repeat rates by tech, by machine and by product is crucial to keeping the department running optimally.
If the overall repeat rate rises over time, the radiology manager can pinpoint if it is due to one tech (who needs additional in-service training), to one machine (that needs maintenance and/or requires in-service training for the techs) or one product (that might be defective and/or requires in-service training for the techs).