The migration from in-person office work to hybrid or entirely virtual work models has impacted nearly every industry, healthcare being no exception. In-person care models will always be the staple for healthcare providers, but for the supporting staff including IT, billers, coders and business office, remote work is here to stay. The question for healthcare organization leadership has accordingly transitioned from “How do I get staff back into the office setting?” to “How can I optimize this transition to the new normal of remote work?”.
Embracing innovative and enabling technology has allowed this transition to take place while minimizing the overall productivity impact that could correspond with the departure from the office work standard. Companies like ZOOM, DoorDash and Netflix all reaped the gains of their investments, taking advantage of the new stay-at-home environment. Healthcare organizations should take heed and pursue technology investments of their own to ensure productivity and efficiency remains the same or even exceeds the prior in-office standard.
Establishing objective productivity metrics and the means to monitor them effectively are essential pieces to the overall productivity puzzle. Specifically, the work of HIM and billing departments has always been an objective driven field where office attendance, work hours, records coded, bills sent, were the currency of a productive biller or coder. Shifting focus to the efficiency metrics that directly impact the profitability and efficiency of a healthcare organization and implementing technology that allows for tracking these metrics will provide benefits for both the employee and the institution.
Beyond monitoring productivity, the flipside of the remote work productivity coin is providing the virtual worker the optimal technology to effectively do their job. Worker to worker collaboration has suffered with the transition to remote work. Although it still needs to be prioritized when possible, collaboration must be supplemented by technology that can provide better, actionable and more shareable data to bridge the chasm of in-person coordination.
Softek has designed tools with the direct purpose of addressing these gaps in monitoring, visibility, and efficiency. The Biller Productivity and HIM Productivity tools provide real-time, actionable data on how efficiently the biller and coders are. Charge Reconciliation, Order Integrity and Physician Documentation tools streamlines the work of virtual Revenue Integrity teams and provides an easy access ‘source of truth’ versus shuffling various versions of excel extracts and pivot tables. Leveraging technology to enhance remote work will define healthcare organizations now and into the future.
What does Softek® do?
Softek’s mission is to help hospital systems maximize their investment in Oracle Cerner Millennium®. We do this by providing innovative software solutions and consulting services that can achieve more together than either can alone.
At Softek, our team of innovators and software developers brings expertise beyond the ordinary to every client. Our experts are involved with Oracle Cerner Millennium® hospitals throughout the country, consulting clients so they can optimize system performance and revenue integrity.
Softek delivers a full suite of consulting services and software solutions to assess and optimize EMR system performance, including revenue cycle integrity and patient accounting.
Softek was awarded 2021 Best in KLAS for Revenue Cycle Optimization.
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