{Straight talk for clients.}

IN THIS ISSUE: Learn how Net Health 360 Professional Services can improve your workflow. Plus, check out three actionable tips you could use at your clinic today in this quarter’s Flash. 

Dear Agility,

I am the director of multiple occupational medicine clinics that also see employees from the hospital as part of their employee health program. As I am unable to be in the clinics on a day-to-day basis, I am not sure how the internal “workings” are functioning. From what I gather, and hear, there is a sense of chaos that I can’t identify. I’ve heard about Net Health 360 Professional Services and am wondering if that might be the answer to help me see the big picture.

The Solution

I’ve heard this distress call on more than one occasion and feedback like this was what initially helped influence the development of Net Health’s 360 Professional Services offering. As part of the Net Health 360 Professional Services team, I provide consulting services that examine your clinic’s workflow, requirements, and resources to ensure your programs meet all your, and your patients’, needs.

2018 was a productive year for Professional Services as I visited over 40 customer sites, many with multiple locations, to perform our most popular service—Health Checks. A Health Check is a specific 360 offering, that includes an experienced consultant coming onsite for two days as a fresh set of eyes to analyze your workflows, protocols, key performance indicators, Agility best practices, and more. Each customer is unique, and this past year, hundreds of different issues were identified during Health Checks. Many recommendations were provided to address these issues and to improve efficiency, increase knowledge of the best practices for utilizing Agility, and create awareness of compliance issues.

Wondering what sorts of issues come up during Health Check? Check out three of the top issues that I identified during 2018 and the recommendations that go along with them to get 2019 started on the right foot.

1. HIPAA Violations: Throughout the year, I’ve found staff tend to become lax when it comes to privacy, whether HIPAA applies or not. To keep staff on their toes, I recommend sending a ‘secret shopper’ in to evaluate if information considered private is discussed in public areas. Not only will the secret shopper assess HIPAA and privacy violations, but they are also able to score customer service in your facility. An outsider can provide valuable information that you will not ascertain as a known employee or manager of the establishment.
2. When Workarounds Don’t Work: As users become more comfortable exploring various elements of Agility, shortcuts invariably occur. While the shortcut may get the job done, it may not always be the most efficient or effective way to complete that activity. Even worse, it may result with inaccurate data being captured by the user causing incomplete reporting. This is most noticeable when there are multiple clinics and the process varies from one location to another. Standardization is key here. Documenting and sharing your workflows and checking in periodically to ensure this documentation is being used is essential for accurate reporting and avoiding shortcuts.
3. Review Those Charts: If you are billing, has your billing department reported an issue with insurance carriers down-coding visits? Periodic chart reviews should be conducted to ensure that all the data needed to support a certain level of service is documented. Chart reviews can also assist in showing if staff are consistently following the workflows defined versus those that sporadically capture vitals, HPI, ROS, etc.

Inviting a secret shopper in to assess your clinic, clearly documenting your workflows, and conducting chart reviews are only the beginning. Your team must be diligent in performing ongoing follow-ups to keep everyone on track and keep information in Agility up-to-date and secure.

What’s next?

Think you might be interested in having Professional Services come alongside to help optimize your clinic? Click here to learn more about the offerings available to you.  By combining internal talents with a consultant that speaks your language, rest-assured you will be on the path to success.

This month’s contributor was Eddie Stahl, Clinical Solutions Consultant.

Keep Learning

Keep learning about Agility best practices and optimization by attending our first Agility User Conference, this September 14-15 in Arizona (just before the NAOHP conference). Click here to learn more and sign up to receive future updates.

Join us for a webinar to learn about a new feature available in 10.23 that can increase your efficiency by automating notification emails to employees and patients based on due dates, demographic information, and more. Click here to register. 

Did You Know?

The deadline to electronically submit your 2018 OSHA Form 300A is March 2, 2019. Don’t forget that Agility supports a compatible .csv extract of your 300A data that can be uploaded directly to OSHA’s Injury Tracking Application. To learn how to use this feature, reference the OSHA folder found under Documentation in Net Health University. Note that you must be on Agility 10.17 or more recent to use this feature.

On January 25^th, OSHA issued a final rule officially rescinding the regulation to electronically submit information from OSHA Forms 300 and 301.

And the winner is….

Thanks for your feedback in our fourth quarter Product Satisfaction Survey.

Each quarter, we ask you to complete a brief survey sharing Agility feedback. In the last quarter of 2018, 142 of you responded!  Those who complete the survey can enter a drawing for either a donation to a charity of the winner’s choice or a prize, most recently an iPad.  Our fourth quarter winner was Susan. Congratulations! Thanks for your thoughtful feedback. Our first quarter surveys have already kicked off—please take time to respond when you receive a survey this quarter!