Pulling Medical Records Made Painless
Imagine for a moment, the stress and anxiety associated with the words “Third Party Payer Audit.” Now take a deep breath. Imagine simply taking a spreadsheet of the patient charts to be audited, uploading that spreadsheet and receiving in return a zip file on your local machine that contains a complete PDF of the patient records requested.
This is exactly what VitalCenter can now do. Traditionally, pulling medical records for Insurance Audits has been a time consuming and costly project that raises concerns about patient privacy and EHR performance. VitalCenter 2.0 provides a cost-effective and efficient way to provide patient records to auditors while eliminating concerns about patient privacy and EHR performance.
One of Galen’s VitalCenter clients asked our development team if there was a way they could use the VitalCenter product to provide medical records of a select group of patients to an auditor. Working collaboratively with this partner we were able to develop a custom feature that will be included in the next general release of VitalCenter.
Insurance companies hire vendors to perform an Audit at a rate of $2-3 a chart. The medical providers then have the responsibility of providing auditors with office space, training the auditors on the use of the EHR and often provide staff to supervise the work of the auditors. Not only are these audits time consuming and costly for medical providers, but they also have implications for patient privacy and EHR performance. There is currently no way within the EHR to restrict the access of auditors to a pre-defined group of patients. Additionally, a group of auditors printing entire charts via the EHR can result in major performance issues with the print server in the production system.
Now, Auditors can provide the medical providers with a list of patient names to be included in the audit. The patient names are uploaded into a secure web portal and a zip file is generated containing the entire patient chart for each name on that list. These can be provided electronically to the Insurance company in the form of PDF files or printed documents – all without the overhead expenses of a traditional audit, without privacy concerns for patients excluded from the audit and without affecting performance on the live print server.
Max.Henson-Stroud
