Month End Practice Reporting

From One Day to 30 Minutes

Summary
One Group Practice Administrator was using Excel to manage month end Physician Practice Reports containing charges, adjustments, payments, visit and surgery counts, etc. originating from ''green bar'' reports from the group practice management system. This method of reporting, originating in a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was used to grow and manage the group from 15 to more than 40 physicians. Each month a new spreadsheet was created and new data appended by hand, often resulting in errors. Each time a new physician was added, there was a greater chance for error from the various formulas.

A great deal of time was spent to find and correct the errors in the spreadsheet. Most importantly, during a period in the month where their time was better spent with physicians and managers; the Administrator was desk-bound updating the spreadsheet. The task required a high level of proprietary knowledge and spreadsheet expertise and could not be delegated.

Weston recognized the problem and offered a technology solution which resulted in reducing the Administrator's time on this project. This solution provided the opportunity to reduce this workload to a clerk level and now takes no more than 30 minutes a month instead of one day.

Solution
The Weston Group worked to isolate the business logic into a system to remove the reliance on any single person. Weston initially created an Access-based system that parsed the ASCII reports, which were copied to the user's machine, and pulled the data into the Access database. From there, reports were generated that closely approximated the previous spreadsheet output. Later, this system was migrated to a Web-based system providing the same functionality, but removing the system from any single user's PC.

Now, the reports only needed to be sent to a printer queue that actually forwards the data to the Web server where the report is parsed and the data loaded into a centralized database. Final reports are still generated from Access with tables linked to the central database. Time to load and report in the first iteration, described above, dropped to 30-to 45-minutes. Time to load and report in the second iteration is now approximately 10 minutes.

Benefit
This system has replaced 1+ day(s) per month of an Administrator’s time with 10 to 30 minutes per month of a clerk's time.

Many group practices extract data in a variety of reports at month's end which are then combined together into a more concise report. There are excellent reasons to use tried and true reports from the group practice management system, but there is no reason to re-type that information to produce the final product. Practice efficiencies were gained by automating a previously manual system.

Weston can assist your group with efficient physician reports that save valuable time. Contact us to set-up a process for your group's needs.