Reimbursement and the Affordable Care Act Oct 23 2013
If you are a physician in your own practice or in a hospital—or allied health professional (e.g., nurse practitioner or registered dietician) —you are aware of the need to track and monitor your patients efficiently. Preventive care has been expanded by the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a Obama Care, and millions of people are expected to join the ranks of the insured—which means you may experience an increase in patient visits. Expanded preventive health insurance coverage includes annual “well women” visits, mammograms, cervical cancer screening, human papilloma virus testing, and testing for anemia and gestational diabetes in pregnant women. The Savance Health patient tracker can enable you to absorb changes resulting from an increase in patients, health care visits and reimbursements.
While understanding insurance changes applicable to each of your patient’s health insurance providers may be time-consuming, utilizing software to tally your patients will enable you to conserve the time to study the coverage changes that can affect your practice—instead of wasting time on administrative tasks.
As a clinician, project management of your patients is probably not a high priority for you as compared to delivering health care services—and it need not be with the aid of Savance Health software to manage patient and asset tracking. Your administrative staff will also appreciate the HIPAA patient check in kiosks, so patients can conveniently check into the hospital without the need of the receptionist. Also, using the HIPAA compliant patient display boards will decreases the amount of time your receptionists have to answer questions about the patient’s status. Overall admin and receptionists can be focused on dealing with administrative tasks instead of dealing with patient, staff, and asset tracking issues.
To improve clinical care by fostering collaboration between a patient’s health care practitioners, the use of electronic patient information was promoted by the Institute of Medicine in its 2001 book, Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century.
Savance Health’s patient tracker can collect critical information from the patient at time of patient check in — and thereby increase your capacity to quickly share information with other clinicians providing treatment to the same patient.
In turn, insurance companies rate medical providers as to the overall quality of their care. Utilizing software to perform project management can enable you to focus on providing medical care to your patients rather than office management.
Your patients may not understand how preventive coverage has increased under the Affordable Care Act, and you can take the time to explain it to them if you are not tied up with administrative processes. The hours saved by use of the patient tracking software, HIPAA patient check in kiosks, and HIPAA compliant display boards, can be devoted to more patient care—and assisting your patients to grasp their new preventive care options (which they may choose to have at your facility).
Whether tracking staff, assets, or patients, use of Savance Health’s software can streamline the entire tracking process—enabling you to operate your practice in a more organized manner. Increased efficiency is one of the aims of the health care model known as the “patient-centered medical home”—promoted by the Department of Health and Human Services. You can demonstrate that your practice or health center is on the cutting-edge of clinical service delivery (as embodied by the “patient-centered medical home” model) by furthering the software integration of your clinical practice or facility. The Savance Health patient tracking system can be a key part of your state-of-the-art software system that can enable you to adapt quickly to changes in health insurance reimbursement amounts.