ST. PETERSBURG, FL – Three hospitals in the University of Maryland Medical System are now able to share financial and clinical data on patients, thanks to the implementation of CareMedic Systems, Inc.’s new electronic Financial Record (eFR) solution.
Shore Health System in Easton, Md., Baltimore-based Maryland General Hospital and Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie, Md. have all gone live with eFR, allowing business offices to store and extract information from disparate financial systems in a common patient folder. All of the data, including insurance, eligibility, coverage information, referral information, physicians and department encounters, is tied directly to the patient account.
Officials at St. Petersburg, Fla.-based CareMedic say eFR allows large health systems like UMMS to tie together disparate hospital information systems (HIS) to gain aggregated, enterprise-wide reporting capabilities, leading to improved financial operations and allowing the systems to create a consistent technology platform without replacing their various HIS systems.
“We chose the eFR solution because we were seeking an approach that could give us better data and better tracking across our system,” said Hank Franey, senior vice president of finance at UMMS, in a press release provided by CareMedic.
“Instead of investing years and multiple millions of dollars to standardize our patient accounting systems, we’ve implemented the eFR solution in one year for a fraction of the cost. … The solution will ultimately give us access to a customizable and easy-to-0se dashboard report, plus it promises to enhance our management of accounts receivable.”
The three hospitals will soon be joined by a fourth hospital in the network, University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, which expects to go live with eFR by the end of the summer.
Christine Fontaine, director of the CBO at Shore Health System, said the eFR’s capabilities allow hospital staff to see specific accounts that they need to work on, rather than a large number of accounts that aren’t a priority. “They can slice and dice the data to resolve accounts effectively and efficiently,” she said. “They’ve taken to it like fish to water and in a short time become savvy users,” she said.
Tell me your experiences with CareMedic solutions. Do they get the job done? Write to eric.wicklund@medtechpublishing.com.