The electronic Financial Record™ (eFR™)

The next step in healthcare financial management

Managing patient financial information is complicated by the need to access data from disparate systems to view all of the activity related to a single patient encounter. Consolidating this information is further complicated by the fact that electronic data, electronic documents and scanned documents are rarely tied to the same file.

The eFR is designed to leverage the capabilities of your existing information systems by layering on top of them. A core of shared workflow, document management, reporting and integration components defines the eFR and ensures that the right people get the right information at the right time to optimize efficiency and increase the resulting cash realization across your revenue cycle operations.

The eFR is designed to connect your systems and the data they contain, while providing a user-friendly environment with dashboard reporting views and automated work lists so that you can easily track information as it moves through the revenue cycle. Powerful, yet easy-to-use setup and management tools empower you to use the system the way you want.

The eFR creates an online, long-term record of each patient’s financial activity, storing information from both CareMedic applications and other hospital systems in a common patient folder. Once the patient folder is created, it is continuously updated as your staff makes changes or additions in any of the systems that feed the eFR.

The system offers extensive activity tracking capability, recording descriptions and dates for every event that occurs inside or outside the patient accounting system, including actions performed when using CareMedic’s ResolveAR services.

Our customers exceed industry best practice standards every day using the eFR system to discover the root cause of lag times and errors, and to enable optimized processes to fix problems at the source. Key areas such as admissions, charge capture, coding, payment posting, denial management, and insurance follow-up can benefit from the automated workflow and information delivery available using the eFR. Complete data capture support and reporting provides the information necessary to discover opportunities to lower AR days. The eFR is system independent and interfaces with most major patient accounting systems. The eFR will help you accelerate cash flow and improve net collections.

Powerful Dashboard Capability

The eFR’s dashboard functionality enhances and complements the system’s robust capabilities and enables you to continually refine revenue cycle operations using its combination of analytical tools, data aggregation methods, and personalized views. This comprehensive Performance Management Dashboard analyzes claim data and provides Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to enable effective management at all levels.

Using a daily data feed from the eFR’s centralized database, the dashboard presents valuable decision support information in a user-friendly, flexible interface that helps you maximize productivity. Its features include trend analysis, alert management, automated escalation, and dynamic drill-down. The dashboard views are set up with standard CFO, PFS, and billing manager users, and the views can be personalized by each user.

Here is a partial list of KPIs for the eFR:

• Total AR dollars
• AR aging percent
• Average percent of contractual adjustment
• Gross AR days
• Denial rate
• Denial dollars
• Daily revenue
• Dollar amount of unbilled claims
• Number of unbilled claims
• Percent of claims with error

The traditional revenue cycle model requires a variety of people to access, monitor, update and correct information in a number of disparate systems that often cannot communicate with one another. This creates tremendously complex and inefficient workflows that require an extensive amount of time and labor to fully recover payment for the medical services that the organization has provided.

A first step in standardizing information for more effective management is the establishment of standard revenue cycle milestones. Each milestone represents a step, or event, along the path from an account’s inception to its resolution. The eFR provides milestone "buckets" in which accounts are stored until the appropriate action sends them on to the next step. Accounts can’t be lost in black holes because they are always associated with a milestone, and identified as part of the organization’s workflow.

Attaching accounts to milestones helps you reduce write offs, identify productivity bottlenecks, and improve tracking and workflow capabilities.

One of the most difficult tasks for patient financial services personnel is to accurately track the progress of claims—particularly those that are denied. The eFR provides a truly intelligent global tracking capability to help you stay on top of claim activity, even when a claim has been sent to an intermediary. Automatic timely filing alerts prevent avoidable write-offs by ensuring accounts receive attention before filing deadlines are missed, as well.

The eFR system creates an aged trial balance (ATB) report based on milestones, so that you can instantly pinpoint system bottlenecks and drill down into the detail of each milestone when necessary. It also provides a complete audit trail within each account that identifies every action taken on a claim, the person who performed the task, and when it was completed.

Global tracking allows you to improve revenue recovery, shorten the AR cycle, measure departmental productivity and take timely action to reduce write-offs due to missed deadlines.

The eFR uses an intelligent workflow architecture that automatically assigns and distributes accounts to the appropriate user or the correct suspense status based on event-driven logic (business rules). Automatically updating the work lists as events occur, the system employs automated workflow relieving managers and supervisors of the need to constantly create, monitor and update work lists, so they’re free to perform more valuable tasks.

The eFR truly automates your workflow, performing routine tasks based on the rules you have set up in the system. The result is significantly enhanced productivity and lower cost-to-collect as a result of labor and time savings.

Total revenue cycle management

The eFR product suite presents a new standard for revenue cycle management. The eFR’s integrated specialized applications manage and accelerate critical phases of the revenue cycle. The eFR core leverages the power of integrated data flow so that patient account information is shared across the revenue cycle, rather than stored in disparate locations. With the eFR, authorized users have instant access to patient account information from any location.

Information contained in the eFR includes, but is not limited to:

• Identity documents
• Insurance cards
• Admitting documents
• Authorizations
• Verifications
• Consent forms
• ABNs
• Billing forms
• Claims (UB-92, UB-04, 1500, ANSI 837)
• EOBs
• ERAs (ANSI 835)
• Automated claim status (ANSI 277)
• Correspondence
  

For more information about the eFR, please contact us by completing our information request form.