Denials…a HIM department’s worst nightmare.
The average health care facility spends around $118 appealing each claim denial. Now think about how many denials your facility has on a monthly basis. The time and effort that goes into an appeal can be arduous.
When denials occur from missing documentation, often the missing records should have been provided by an outside source. Why is it harder than ever to obtain outside medical records? The COVID pandemic certainly has not helped.
Many facilities have found the gaps in their ability to obtain medical records — whether it is due to:
- Staffing shortages
- Limited in-person interactions due to COVID restrictions
- Information Governance
Staffing shortages and limited in-person interactions have made obtaining medical records even more challenging.
COVID has affected staffing of organizations nationwide. It’s no secret that many organizations are struggling to find, train, and keep team members to meet patient needs—including those who gather medical records. It’s less than ideal when patients take on the burden of trying to gather their own records. With many medical records departments closed for in-person contact, patients get frustrated or have incomplete and, sometimes, delayed records.
eHealth Technologies has a staff of over 400 team members dedicated to obtaining medical records for your facility. Your patient’s needs can be met in a timely manner, while allowing you to use your team members for more value-added functions.
Information governance and having experienced team members has become a weak link within the medical record retrieval process.
In the AHIMA Journal article “Requesting Medical Records”, it was noted that “Misinformation about HIPAA, inefficient workflows, lack of adequate staff training, poor communication, and complexities pertaining to state and federal laws often lead to unnecessary barriers in patient access and information blocking.” Often due to these obstacles, many organizations must reallocate their resources to focus on ensuring that the team gathering health care records is highly trained to meet Information Governance requirements – including privacy and information security standards.
At eHealth Technologies our teams are HIPAA trained on all guidelines when obtaining patient records. Our proprietary processes and secure delivery methods ensure a high level of protection and safety.
How can you access best practices for managing medical records?
An InfoGovBasics.com article recently reinforced the need to develop centralized control of information that drives efficiency and cost savings. The article noted that a centralized framework is essential to “check that information is properly tagged and classified so information is identified.”
eHealth Technologies can assist you in this effort through our eHealth Connect Intelligent Clinical Record services. This service includes organizing the gathered medical records by type and date, completing a quality assurance check to eliminate duplicates, identifying loaded documents into a basic index table, and ensuring every page includes two patient identifiers. The records are delivered directly to your EMR for easy accessibility and use.
Solutions for today and tomorrow.
As COVID continues to evolve so must the health care industry. eHealth Technologies can help you cover all your bases through this pandemic and beyond by helping to optimize staffing, provide secure data transfer, and expedite retrieval of medical records in an organized and easy-to-use format.
eHealth Technologies has helped many organizations meet their medical record retrieval needs while:
- Meeting HIPAA guidelines
- Delivering records safely and securely directly into EMRs
- Helping to free up team members for other priorities
Partnering with eHealth Technologies can set your organization on a path to build a stronger, more efficient information governance program.
