BOSTON – Partners HealthCare hopes to gain workflow benefits and streamline financial operations through the implementation of a new patient administration and revenue cycle management system.
The Boston-based healthcare system will implement the Soarian Financials applications from Siemens Medical Systems beginning this month.
Full implementation will take five to seven years, said Peter Markell, vice president of finance for Partners. Soarian will be installed first at Partners hospitals, then in physician organizations tied to those facilities, and finally in non-acute facilities, he said.
Standardization on Soarian Financials will eliminate the need to support a variety of other vendors and homegrown financial applications, Markell said.
“This will be a very big change for us, but one that we think is necessary,” he said. “We did do a calculation on return on investment and we believe there will be a return on this, but we also believe it is strategically important for functioning as a healthcare system.”
Soarian Financials is designed to help providers manage costs through a holistic, patient-centric, workflow-driven approach, said Janet Dillione, president of health services for Siemens’ healthcare IT division. Partners will install the full suite of financial applications, which includes scheduling, decision support, enterprise document management, community access and healthcare data exchange, which enables connectivity with payers.
Partners also hopes to gain efficiency and save money by moving to a service-oriented architecture. As a computing approach, SOA assists in programming and system design by providing the ability to individually extend, reuse and access services, which are software components that implement a business task or process. Partners and Siemens believe deploying SOA into complex healthcare processes could improve system flexibility and agility while optimizing workflow experience.
Markell said the Soarian application goes beyond traditional patient management and accounting systems by embedding a contract engine and enterprise-wide master patient index into a comprehensive revenue cycle solution. That will help streamline processes throughout the healthcare system and enable performance tracking to meet Partners’ financial goals.
“The biggest benefit, with all the pricing arrangements we encounter, is that if we do go with a more retail, consumer-driven approach, it will enable people to see all the information right upfront,” he said. “Clerical people doing the admission now aren’t able to know all the rules set by a patient’s payer. This will give them those tools on the front end.”