(What follows is an excerpt from the white paper: “No Paper Necessary: Four Senior Living and Post-Acute Care Providers Take the Plunge”)
What other benefits from have you seen with EMR and were you surprised by any of them?
Matt Auman, COO, Encore Healthcare: I’ll just rattle off some numbers. Our distribution of Medicare A’s, B’s, and C’s since we put this in our pilots are our A’s, which are the lowest acuity are down 54 percent. Our B’s are up 5 percent, and then our C’s, which are our most acute patients, are up 17 percent. That’s not because we have different patients, that’s because we’re more accurately capturing what we do. That’s translated into about a 10.5% increase in our Medicare case mix, and about a 7.5% increase in our Medicaid case mix. Our Med A rate’s up about nine percent in these buildings, and our turnover is down in three of the four.
Ted Goins, Jr., President, Lutheran Services for the Aging: For us, same type thing – higher acuity. So better reimbursement, less errors – and I intended to share some data that I just got on my way out the door to come up here, but I’m not going to share it because it looks too good and there has to be something wrong with the numbers.
We did have some staff that initially said, “I’ll quit when you start this.” The good news is they quickly learned it and embraced it. We’ve only had one person in the whole organization that said, “I would rather go somewhere else than to do this,” and I thought that was a phenomenally low number. There is a real pride in having that kind of system. The families and the community are seeing another level of professionalism.
I guess the other benefit for us has been the ease in identifying problems with a search trigger, to look at therapy certifications or physicians orders, or that we have the right lab work to be able to look at those things quickly and be able to see where the holes are and then get those fixed quickly.
In this white paper, “No Paper Necessary: Four Senior Living and Post-Acute Care Providers Take the Plunge,” you’ll hear from:
Ted Goins, Jr. (President, Lutheran Services for the Aging)
Matt Auman (COO, Encore Healthcare)
Mary Evans (COO, Covenant Care)
Tony Ramirez (Director of Clinical IT, Skilled Healthcare)
