Net Health ® Clinical Trials | Case Study

[bws_pdfprint display=’print’]

Regional health system in South Dakota streamlines reporting and optimizes billing with Net Health® Therapy for Hospital Outpatient

The Challenge The Solution The Result

What I really like is the business intelligence dashboard. My ability to get a pulse on what’s going on is incredible. Quickly, at a glance, I can look at any one or all of my clinics and know how we are doing from a productivity standpoint. We make more informed decisions, understanding why certain things are happening and if we should be doing anything differently. I could go on – there are just so many useful features and reports!”

Outpatient Therapy Manager,
South Dakota Health System

The Challenge

The Outpatient Therapy Manager at a South Dakota health system had worked with his team for years to extract the most value from their existing systemwide EMR. “In my opinion, we were as efficient within our EMR as we could be, and there were still some challenges,” he reflected. He also wanted to push for continuity through all of the outpatient therapy services across the entire system. When he requested baseline data from the network to build his business case, only two sites were able to provide information to inform historical analysis – highlighting the need to invest in systems and processes.

Further, “we had a tendency to apply the most stringent billing rules to all payers,” the Outpatient Therapy Manager continued. “Everyone was, and remains, concerned with being compliant, of course. Out of an abundance of caution, we applied Medicare rules to every patient, regardless of their insurance, missing opportunities to bill our payers for all services rendered.”

With many geographically dispersed clinics and clinical software that was not exactly fit for purpose, as well as disparate processes and levels of reliance on software, leadership saw an opportunity to evaluate alternatives and recommend investing in a new platform. “I had looked at a variety of different systems,” The Outpatient Therapy Manager said, “considering a variety of features in terms of integrating with an underlying EMR, what devices could you use, what were the scheduling and billing and integration features, and up-front and ongoing costs.”

Net Health® Therapy for Hospital Outpatient in a few words? First of all, trust me, it works. And secondly, honestly, every single person that I have met from Net Health has been top-notch – people that I would pick for friends. They’re people I enjoy working with, they’re reliable, they’re trustworthy. I’ve developed actual relationships with the people and that is an awesome place to be when you’re working with a company.”

Outpatient Therapy Manager, South Dakota Health System

The Solution

Ultimately, the regional health system selected Net Health’s hospital-based outpatient EHR solution. The foundation of their attraction to the platform was the concept that the software was designed by therapists for therapists – meaning clinicians enjoyed benefits such as:

  • Intuitive and customizable workflows
  • Documentation at point of care, rather than after or in between sessions
  • Billing and compliance optimizations, enabling the health system to tailor billing to each payer
  • Superior functionality for practice administration and reporting, including the ability to begin tracking data for historical analysis across the system

Net Health’s hospital-based outpatient rehab therapy EHR solution, Net Health® Therapy for Hospital Outpatient, benefits clinicians by focusing on the visit and treatment cycles and putting the patient’s outcomes front and center. When the updated solution became available, it immediately caught the Outpatient Therapy Manager’s attention.

“I got my first glimpse of the new platform,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, this was what I was looking for.’ It was organized even better and it looked better, too.”’

The Results

After migrating to Net Health® Therapy for Hospital Outpatient, this large, regional health system in South Dakota recognized a variety of benefits, such as gains in clinical and administrative workflow efficiencies, greater insight into performance, and more agile release cycles for their software. “To put it simply, we generated more revenue with the same staff thanks to Net Health,” its Outpatient Therapy Manager said. At the same time, thanks to compliance assistance built into the platform, the health system has seen a marked decrease in compliance issues and denials.

Benefits this client has enjoyed thanks to Net Health® Therapy for Hospital Outpatient include:

  • An additional unit of billing per therapist, per day (this yielded nearly a $250,000 ROI after their first year)
  • An incremental $140,000 ROI the first year after implementing Net Health® Therapy for Hospital Outpatient
  • A reduction in denials and accelerated payments of claims from all payers
  • Rapid deployment of new features or other changes to the platform – from weeks or months, to virtually overnight