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On Demand: Advanced Scheduling and Billing Tactics ...
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Okay, so we're going to get started with a few housekeeping items. Today's webinar is called Advanced Scheduling and Billing Tactics for Cardiac Device Clinics. It's sponsored by one of our long term industry partners, Vector Remote. Before we get started, there are a couple things just to go through. If you go down to the chat feature at the bottom of your screen, you will have today's presentation available to download later on and share with your colleagues. So that will be available. If you have any questions, there's a Q&A feature. We're probably going to be saving our questions for the end. But if you enter your questions into the Q&A function there, we'll be monitoring that box and passing those on to the team there at Vector Remote. So with that, let's get started. Again, today's presentation, Advanced Scheduling and Billing Tactics for Cardiac Device Clinics. We have a nice panel to share with you. But for that, we have a guest moderator. And that's Mitchell Fong with Innovize Consulting. Let him do the introductions and kick us off and get started. So Mitchell, if you will, take it away. Thank you, Chris. And thank you, everybody, for joining us today. We hope you enjoy the session and gain a lot of value. We're really excited. My name is Mitchell Fong, founder and CEO of Innovize Consulting. We're a firm focused on digital transformation in healthcare. My background is in population health and healthcare administration, where I used to lead virtual care over an IDN system across multiple states on the West Coast. And with that, remote monitoring was one of the service lines under my purview. So as we move forward here, we'll get into some disclosures. The thing to note is that our panelists were paid for their time to speak and participate in the webinar. But everything they say is authentic. Nothing is specific on what they are endorsed to speak on. Everything that they're speaking on is their true experience and just sharing what they know about the industry for all of you. Today we'll highlight the objectives, we'll really talk about the billing, the changes, what that has done to the workflow, and then how they created best practices to incorporate these CPT code changes and then define success for their clinics. And then finally end with a little look into the future of what we're excited to come for the industry. So I'll start then with introductions with Joy Lewis, a cardiac device technician at Dignity Health and an amazing technician that we have. So Joy, I'll pass it to you to introduce yourself and Dignity. Good morning. Thank you, Mitchell. Thank you for joining me today. My name is Joy Lewis. I am a cardiac device technician with Dignity Health. My focus is on the remote monitoring aspect of the clinic. Throughout our clinics, we have 23 providers which encompass both electrophysiology and cardiology practices. We have five RNs and technicians, two dedicated technicians at our electrophysiology clinics. We have two administrative support staff which help with our medical records department with uploading reports. And we have a combined over 2,500 CIED patients. We started our partnership with Vector Remote Monitoring in March of 2022. And then we quickly learned that it was going to be a success. So we rolled out our cardiology location in November of 2022. And now we have 15 different Dignity Health locations on remote monitoring with Vector. Our key accomplishments, we have streamlined our workflows which have saved the equivalent of 4.09 FTEs. And we've increased our connectivity up to 94% from a baseline of 70. As you can see, we've improved our active to enrolled patients quite a bit. And we have maintained a high CSAT score with a 97% satisfaction. So that's it. Thank you so much. Mitchell. Thank you, Joy. And just incredible results there. As you can see on the screen, this is why we have Joy here. Efficiency, effectiveness, revenue, and high satisfaction scores, being a model to then use to roll it out to other sites. I think hopefully you guys will learn a lot about what Joy has been able to do to be successful. And we also have what I like to call a dynamic duo from the Baylor College of Medicine joining us. So we have Nicola Blanc-Butler, the manager of the cardiology practice, hopefully I didn't butcher the name, and Yanet Pineda, coordinator of business operations. I'll let them talk a little bit about themselves and the success that they've had at Baylor as well. All right. Thank you guys for joining. My name is Nicola Blanc-Butler. I'm the practice manager for cardiology here at Baylor College of Medicine at the Fenton Tower location. Now we have 11 providers, with five of them being electrophysiologists, five RNs, two techs, which the techs are me and myself, Yanet, and we have 1,200 CIED patients. We started using Vector back in September of 2023, and it has been a great addition to our practice. We were on a remote, we had a, I'm sorry, we had a device clinic that we have now, using Vector has made our practice a lot more efficient, and we are grateful that we were able to partner with Vector. Aloha. Thank you for joining. My name is Yanet Pineda, and I am the coordinator of business operations. I do assist with billing, and coding, and just getting all the devices built correctly, and making sure that patients are getting their devices checked when they're supposed to. Now ever since joining Vector, it has honestly increased patient satisfaction, and my workload has gone down, and I, I mean, we have accomplished many things, as you can see. We do have key accomplishments here, where we have streamlined workflows, and saved 2.11 FTEs. We increased patient connectivity from 31% to 89%, which is a big difference, especially when it comes to patients, and being taken care of with cardiac devices. We have achieved 92% patient compliance from a baseline of 23%, which again, that is also a great increase, and is very great for our practice, and for our patients' care, and we have exceptional patient satisfaction at 100% CSAT score. I love that. 100% CSAT score, customer satisfaction score, is incredible, obviously can't get better than that, so really look forward to learning what you guys have to share about how you're able to improve that connectivity, and maintain that satisfaction score. And last but not least, our final panelist is Emma Chamberlain from Vector. She's the Director of Clinical Operations at Vector, and she'll take us through an introduction to herself, but also set the stage for our discussion here today, so Emma, I'll pass it to you. Thanks Mitchell. Hi everyone, I'm Emma Chamberlain, I'm the Director of Clinical Operations here at Vector. I have been here at Vector for about five years, and prior to working here, I was a device clinic supervisor at a Mass General facility here in New Hampshire, where I live. I am an RN by training. Here at Vector, I oversee kind of three main teams, one being our reporting team, which is a group of 25 nurses and techs that kind of triage all of our data that comes in, process all of our transmissions, and send those through to our clinics. I also oversee our patient support team, eight patient support specialists who field calls, make sure people are connected, kind of do all of that legwork. And then also our onboarding team, which works to make sure that all of our new customers are onboarded and successful as quickly as possible. Together, we, you know, really drive for these kind of great patient compliance, CSAT scores, and also a reduction in transmission review time for all of our customers, which is great. We work with our technology, too, to help our customers kind of face and overcome a lot of the challenges that do come with remote monitoring. There's a lot of changes that are happening in this field. Things change really fast, and so we really work with our customers to try to help navigate all of those things. And so just some of those challenges, right? And so I can speak to these from the remote model, like from the vector side, but I also can speak to these a little bit more from my time in clinic and the data burden. Number one, if any of us have ever worked in clinic, you know, you're getting just inundated with information. You can see some metrics here just based on clinic size of how much data remote monitoring provides. It's a great thing to have, but we all know that a lot of that data isn't really actionable, so you're kind of parsing through a lot of stuff that isn't super meaningful. I know from our experience kind of with some of our customers, we see, depending on the device type, up to 60% of our data is neither alertable nor billable. That's just like noisy stuff, right? And so that's just a huge burden for you all in clinic and in trying to work through all of that, staying efficient and kind of handling all of that. Patient connectivity and compliance. I mean, I think we've all had those phone calls where you're just trying to get someone's monitor connected and which way does the USB port go? I think that just a lot of the workflow process just surrounding remote monitoring, and we're talking about a lot of that today, it isn't just the clinical work, right? We're kind of faced with this component of scheduling, this component of billing that really adds to the entire kind of clinical workflow. And on top of kind of these everyday challenges, then you layer on some of these new things, right? And you come up with new recommendations, and we've had a number of significant changes recently that have kind of impacted how we schedule and how we bill in remote monitoring. I want to speak a little more to those two. So I'm going to speak a little bit to a shift in follow-up practices. The 2023 HRS consensus statement really spoke quite a bit to something that they call alert-based scheduling. And so this is a big pivot, right? This is a difference in how we had been doing things. I know when I was in clinic, we had our folks that came in every three months, every six months, every year, depending on kind of how they were set up, what kind of device they had, did they have a remote monitor or not. And so this kind of shift in how we're looking at scheduling is something that's really different. And really what the idea behind alert-based monitoring versus calendar-based, so that's kind of how it used to be, that three, six, nine, 12 month that we're all used to, is essentially in an effort to kind of keep up with the increasing population. We're seeing so many more patients, right? We're seeing so many more patients getting these devices. How do we keep up? How do we continue to see them all? How do we continue to provide great care? It's prompting kind of a shift in how we look at in-office visits. So instead of seeing those people on that kind of calendar-based cadence, hey, you come in, great. You have an uneventful check. Nice to see you. Thanks for coming in. We'll see you again in six months. The HRS consensus statement recommended shifting more to an alert-based visit approach. So that means really leaning on remote monitoring, watching to see if there are any issues. And then if there is a problem, bring the patient in. If there isn't, there maybe is not a case for that. So they speak in that documentation about essentially bringing a patient in if there's an alert, or they recommend up to 24 months, which I know thinking back to my day, it was like 24 months. Oh my goodness, I wouldn't see someone for two years. But you can see how it makes sense. You're going to take your office time up with patients that really need to be seen and kind of let those patients that are just uneventful not have to come into clinic so often. And their recommendations kind of in doing this. And so we all know from working in healthcare that nothing changes quickly. It's hard to kind of make these pivots. It's not like we're all going to go into the office tomorrow and be like, we're going to see everybody every 24 months, right? You're going to have to kind of go through, you're going to have to explain to your patients. It's kind of a whole process. So working to make changes in kind of an incremental way. And that's kind of identifying maybe those patients that are always really great with their connectivity. And this is where we can help our customers with that as well. And those patients that don't have alerts often or ever. Also your patients that don't have any or a lot of comorbidities, right? They're generally a generally healthy group of people keep connected. And so maybe starting to kind of move some of those groups over. But just in speaking kind of to all of the things, these kinds of shifts happen every couple of years. And it really changes how we have to maneuver in the device world quite a bit. Our next change we'll talk about is a billing change. So we had this kind of scheduling change come out. And then we also this year had a billing code change. So both of these are like pretty consequential. Essentially what happened kind of at the beginning of 2024 is carrier code G2066 was eliminated. This code was previously used as a technical code for 93297 and 93298. And so that was eliminated. And what they did then was add in modifiers, dash 26 and dash TC to allow us all to bill for technical only or a professional only component of that fee. And so this is obviously a big change. It kind of normalized the pay rate across the board. And it brings a lot of challenges to all of us again, like we're kind of in a, in a clinical space where we're not only focusing on just clinical things, right? Our work really requires us to look at the scheduling and to look at the billing. And so something that's come out of this now is, you know, we have to identify maybe new billing workflows and some staff needs to get trained on all of those things. Updating EHR systems and billing software, none of these changes can happen kind of in a vacuum. You know, again, you can't just go into the clinic tomorrow and be like, oh, the billing codes are changed. Let's just build a new code. I know from when, when I was in clinic, you know, you'd have to have some meetings. We'd have to get on calls with some people like does billing know? And so these kinds of changes add, add a burden on, in addition to the clinical work we're doing this also kind of increased reimbursement risk, right? Coding errors, you know, as we're kind of shifting over here and that, that obviously can, can impact bottom line for everyone. I know from our side of things, we, we even have seen some of our, some of our payers even taking a while to kind of get updated to these new codes. So that is also something that our customers are seeing, you know, they're billing out to insurance providers and, and they're a little behind the ball as well. And so all of these things, you know, have an impact and, and make the work we do even more complicated. Yeah. And thank you for that overview, Emma. I think it was super helpful to kind of see those changes, but let's start our panel discussion with where you end in on those CP code changes and kind of the impact on workflow and let's hear it from our cardiac device technicians and practices first. Joy, let's start with you. So what impact have you seen with those CPT code changes and workflow changes that Emma outlined? So for us here with D&ED Health, we are not integrated, which means that these each billing code has to be entered manually in our computer system. So for this change, it really didn't make much of a difference. It was literally like a half a second just to add that modifier 26 to that code. So overall, it really didn't make much of a change in our previous billing practices. Awesome. Well, that's good to hear that's minimal. And how about you guys on the Baylor side? Were you guys impacted by these changes or the workflow? And Nicole, let's start with you and go to Yanet after. No, we were not impacted by the changes because we use Epic and so we're integrated. And so we were able to work with our IT team and they loaded those codes in for us. And so we didn't have to worry about it. That's awesome. So it's an automated process to kind of assign those modifiers instead. I think that's fantastic when you are integrated. Yanet, did you want to add anything to that? No, I think Nicole pretty much said everything. It's been great with us. We haven't had any issues. So we're good with the integration and everything. Awesome. And did you guys have to create any changes or have you done any improvements in the workflow over the year? On your side, Nicole, it sounds like you guys worked with the Epic team on the EMR side to build a process to automate those codes. Was there anything else done? Yeah, let's go reverse order this time. So let's start with Yanet and then go to Nicole and Joy. I think the change that took the longest was working with our IT team and being able to bring all the information that was going to be added in order for a billing to be successful and for us to not have any issues or the patients to have any issues. So I think that was the biggest project on our end, just making sure that everybody, including IT and Epic, was on the same page just so patients wouldn't be able to notice a difference. Because like they previously said, whenever new codes are integrated, a lot of things can happen and patients can start receiving bills and they will say, well, why am I receiving a bill previously? I was not receiving any bills. What changed? And then it causes a lot of stress, I believe, on everybody. So I think we had a pretty smooth transition and it was great. I love that, bringing in different stakeholders to make sure everyone's aligned on the changes as you talked about the technicians, the IT team, the EPIC team, and then the patients as well as the ones that might be impacted. I really love that. I think that's awesome that you're able to collaborate across teams. Nicole, did you want to add anything there? Yeah, doing our integration process, like integrating Vector into our EMR system, which is EPIC. I came in on like the end of the project. I was new to cardiology, and so Carrie and our IT team actually brought me up to speed. What we did have, though, was some little issues with our providers finalizing the tests within EPIC because before the integration happened, everything was kind of like printed out on paper, and they would sign them, and then we would have to bill them manually. From that, after the integration occurred with IT and the providers signed off on it, it was a very smooth transition, not just for our patients but also for our providers. They're able to go into the patient's chart and actually finalize that test from there because Baylor has EPIC. It's called HYCU, and then we actually call it billing on the fly. The provider is able to go in and look at the report. With our integration system, they're able to look at the report to see which one has a, what's the word I'm trying to use, where the patient is receiving, or if the patient is having like an episode versus not having an episode, so the integration that happened with the project that occurred with Baylor and Vector has been like amazing, not just for our patients but also for our providers. I love that. Provider experience is a huge part of transformation and change, so managing that, having a smooth process, and I'm glad you're having a great experience. I know you mentioned Keri. For those that don't know, Keri is a team member from the Vector side that supports the Baylor team, and she's been fantastic in helping us prepare and gather some of the data that you saw in the slides earlier as well, so big shout out to Keri. Thank you for our support, and let's go to Joy from the Dignity side. How about yourself? Did you guys have to implement any changes? So for us, it first started out with the great communication that we received from Vector, so prior to the change, well before the change, I received communication from Vector that on this date, this is what would change, so for me, myself, we have one biller, which is myself, who manually enters the charges into our program, which is Cerner, so combined with the information from Vector and the start date, it was an easy change for me to make. There was really no hiccups with the process. Well, I love that. It sounds like having a good partner has really helped you navigate this in a smooth way. Emma, I know you highlighted some of the changes you guys did up front when we started this discussion. Anything you wanted to add on this question or this topic? I don't think too much in regards to billing. I think on our side of things, we saw this change coming in, so we were able to update our system, so as soon as that cutover happened, we were delivering our reports to billing sheets and the different workflows of our clinics with those codes reflected in order, again, to tee people up, make our customers a little more successful when it comes to navigating these, but it does sound like every, and I think from looking at the rest of our customers, too, everyone kind of had a unique experience in navigating this and trying to figure out the changes on their end, too. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. No system is perfectly alike to another, so there are always your unique challenges with each implementation or each augmentation that you have to do, but with that, let's kind of move over from the billing to what does success look like? You guys have talked about success and the efficiency you've gained, but how do you define success as a cardiac remote monitoring program? And this time, let's start with Nicole, and then we'll go to Yanet and Joy after that. Well, Vector has been very, we have been very successful with Vector. We are now, our patients that we used to have calling us going, hey, I need that schedule, I need to know when I come in, we quickly explain to them that now we have a remote monitoring company, and we also explain to them about the app that can be downloaded to their phone. So we had so many patients that would call and say, hey, I'm going to Italy next week, I won't be able to come for my check, and it's like, oh, don't worry about that because now you can download the app on your phone and we'll get your device check. So that was, has been, that was or is a very big plus for our patient care and all because of the quality, we don't miss a patient, right? And so they're able to have their remote check done wherever they are at the time when it's going, the transmission is going to happen. Our providers were a little hesitant about Vector, but now they're really enjoying it because our IT team actually built a finalization button within Epic. So if the report comes over green, they're able to go in and finalize that report. And if the patient has any episodes, they'll see that in the narrative of the Epic report that comes over. A lot of what we used to do manually is now integrated. So that's a big plus because we don't have to scan everything in, the reports actually come over from Vector into our, into the patient's result basket. Jeanette has to go on and she has to go into, oh my God, Smartsheet and check off the boxes so the reports can flow in. But those are some of them, but I'll let Jeanette talk more about it. Well, for me, success, like Nicole has said, a lot of it has been with the patient, patient satisfaction. I think that because we do tend to have a older group of patient, things are a little bit harder. So ever since moving from manual entry, when it came to the device checks, doing digital, it has became better. Patients are a lot happier. I can honestly say we are happier too, just because again, workload, not only for us, but also the providers. I will say that like Nicole said, the providers were a little bit hesitant at first. I mean, it is a big change, especially after they've done things manually after so long. But now that they see how easy it is for the reports to fall directly into their inbox, they review them, they get alerts. If a patient really is having an episode, everything has worked out pretty well. And for me, of course, like Nicole said, I do go on the Smartsheet, I select the devices to be sent off to the providers. So that process has been really great. And again, success in general, patients and providers. I love that. So what I think I heard there is satisfaction on the patient provider side, efficiency in the workflow, and also billing consistency and the efficiency that you guys have gained are some of the core metrics or ways you're defining success in remote monitoring there. So just please add if I'm missing anything, Nadja, I'd love to go to you and hear a little bit about how you guys measure success and if you use any different metrics to measure and indicate that success. Absolutely. So prior to joining Vector Remote Care, the remote was really dependent upon logging onto each vendor website, printing out reports, losing reports, losing billing, the doctors being unable to review any of those until the reports were in front of them. So Vector has really streamlined all of our processes. So now that everything is online, viewable to our providers from anywhere, any computer that they log onto, be it at their clinic, at the hospital, on their cell phone. So it's really the accessibility of being able to view reports at any time and also not losing these reports or losing these billing sheets. Everything is combined together on one platform. So for us, it's really helped our efficiency. It's helped patient care. It's helped everything overall. And that's what success is to me. I love that. Efficiency is a common theme that I'm hearing here in patient care. I love that. I think outcomes, tying it back to the reason why we're doing this, extremely important, but obviously those delivering the care to when Nicole said need to have that smooth process that they believe in. So I love what you guys said there. Emma, I'm going to turn it to you and look at it from the partner side here. How do you define success, both internally for Vector, and then maybe if you look at it from a partner standpoint, how do you guys measure success? Yeah. Yeah. I was definitely, you know, I was listening to the rest of the panelists talking and I was kind of like hearkening back to my clinic days. So I was trying to think of like, what was success then? I think, so I definitely have some thoughts on that. From the Vector side of things, you know, we track all kinds of different metrics and things like that. But I think in the end, we want to be delivering actionable, timely reports to all of our customers that they can provide that patient care in a very timely manner. That's kind of where everything comes back to is making sure that the patient care that we can provide is top-notch, that the things that we are delivering to them are important and that's what they need to see. And so we do kind of track metrics around that. We talked a lot and, you know, in talking about the scheduling earlier and kind of moving towards really leaning on remote monitoring, connectivity is very important. So it's definitely something as far as success goes that we keep an eye on for our customers and trying to keep as many of those patients consistently connected as possible. Better outcomes, it also allows them to kind of shift to these kind of newer workflows that are recommended. And so those things are all important kind of success metrics on our end of things. I was thinking though, and I have to kind of go back again, it's been a while, but to kind of my clinic days. And I was thinking as everyone was talking, like what was going to be like, wow, like I had a great day or had a successful day when I was in clinic. And I think for me at that time, it was feeling like you could get everything done. I think there's like, and I don't know if that's really a metric or any sort of thing that's totally measurable, right? It's kind of a feeling. I was able to look at all of my remotes, whether you're using a third party or not, or you're handling it all in-house, were you able to get through all of your work? Were you able to kind of field all those calls that you had? We had some, there was an alert, I was able to get that patient in urgently. You have the space in your day to have like quality visits, you have the space in your day to take really good care of your patients. And at the end of the day, you can clock out, you can leave the clinic feeling like you did all of your things. And I think that's a success, maybe not a metric, but a feeling, very subjective that I really hope for everyone doing this work, but I know it's so, so hard to come by. And I think it's what we're trying to help on our end of things, our customers achieve is that feeling, right? Where you can leave the office for the day and like, no, you did a great job. You don't have a bunch of stuff still hanging and stressing you out when you go home. I think that's kind of the goal for all of us. So maybe not a metric, but definitely a definition of success. Yeah, I love that. I think employee satisfaction, kind of going back to that, but really burnout, I think is what you're kind of getting to the core of how do we make people feel like every day I can come and be successful to knock it out, but also not be completely stressed and overloaded and take that burden home. I think that's super important. And I love what you said at the beginning, the right care at the right time, the right place, but ensuring that we can deliver quality care. And I think that's a huge focus. And I love that perspective. So it turns to another question of either a challenge that you guys have had and what did you do to overcome it or something that you've implemented as a best practice that you think is great to share with other cardiac practices doing remote monitoring. So Joy, I'll start with you. Either of those two things, can you share an example for the group? Sure. I think one of our biggest challenges is just with connectivity. So making sure the patients are connected, those that have unplugged monitors, have been out of town, didn't know their monitor was unplugged, things of that nature. So Vector is amazing at reaching out to these patients. They have a whole approach to this. They contact them. They mail letters, trying to get everybody connected. I think that's one of the biggest pluses for me is having Vector there to reach out and connect to these patients. And it takes the burden, not the burden, but takes the stress off of the office to reach out to those patients and get them reconnected. So that definitely helps a lot. Yeah. The challenge started with connectivity and the consistency with having patients connected and working with your partner in Vector, you've been able to really leverage their services to augment your team and improve. That is what I think I heard. That's fantastic. Let's go to Yanet on your side. Anything you want to share for challenge you've overcome or best practice that you've implemented? I would say the challenge, of course, was getting the providers on board and showing them that going electrical, you know, with technology advancing, that this was the best option for patients and for providers and the clinic in general. And there are views, of course. So I think that was our biggest challenges. And also training the employees, training everybody to use this system only because, again, we were doing everything manual. So just going from having the control of everything to kind of being like, OK, here you go. Now we don't have control over this. Vector will help us and they will be taking care of all these parts. Now we don't have to. Now we can do all these things. So kind of learning to let go and understanding that it is OK and that we do have all the support and we have a Vector's team that if any question comes up, any problems, any issues with whether it's a patient or the system or anything, they are always there to assist us at any time. So I think that was one of our biggest challenges. But I think we have accomplished really good things and we're at a good space with care. Yeah, I love that. I think getting providers on board, change management is always extremely difficult and training the employees to be effective with the system, always a standard baseline that's required for success during transition. I'm curious, Nicole, do you have anything to add on to that? And if not, I'd love to ask you maybe if you can unpack that further. How did you guys get the providers on board and how did you train your employees to make sure they are ready for success when you guys went and implemented this partnership? I would say, so let me go back to one of the challenges we had when we first, once everything started. And one of the challenges were for our clinical staff, because our patients would, we would get so many phone calls from our patients regarding their monitors and they needed to schedule an appointment to come in. And once they scheduled an appointment to come in, of course, there was like, we would have to charge them for like a device check appointment. What helped us a lot with Vector was when the patients called in with a thinking or believing that they had an episode, we wouldn't have to bring them in for an in-office device check. We could actually create a ticket on Vector to say, hey, can you guys do a remote check for us? And so that way we could call the patient and once the provider looked at the report, give them information and let them know that they are okay and they don't have to come into the office. And then it was a plus also for the providers that the patient was having some type of episode, we could get the patient in for an appointment. So there was some, we had a little, some challenges there. Training for our providers wasn't as easy as we thought it would be because they counted the clicks when we first started to finalize the reports in Epic. It's like, I have 12 clicks. I don't want to do 12 clicks. I just want to look at the report and be able to move forward. So that we had a challenge there. But once we got them trained in our Epic team, actually, like I mentioned before, they created a finalization button for them for reports that didn't have any type of episode that made it easier for them so that they can decide for what, you know, what needed to be looked at and what all that needs to be looked at. But what was very urgent for the providers and urgency with them was what they wanted to see, and we were able to get them trained on that. For our clinical staff, they just, they were a little hesitant, as Yannet said, but Yannet was the person that actually came in and was able to grasp the whole system with Keri. She helped her, and she's amazing with training our clinical staff. And Keri, with Keri's support and all the guys from Vector, it made it easier for our clinical staff to be able to, for their training. I think everybody here at Baylor with our electrophysiologists and our non-invasive cardiology and interventional cardiologists, they actually like it a lot because they can view the reports from anywhere now versus walking into their office and there's a stack of papers like this big from in-office device checks, and you're trying to go through all that. Now you can click on that PDF within the patient's chart, and you can just review that or even look at the narrative that comes over from the Vector report. So Vector's been very successful for us here at Baylor because the manual process is gone. So I just want to say that's the biggest success is that there's no manual process anymore. I love that. And so what I also heard there as far as challenges was how to reduce the burden of the calls and all the device checks and how to ensure that you can treat patients remotely if they didn't need to come in because there was inefficiencies created. And you were able to achieve that with the remote monitoring and the enhanced technology of your partnership to be able to do remote checks as well. And then as far as training, it sounds like you brought people in, Yanet being a champion there, finding a champion, training a champion, and having that champion kind of model the right behavior as far as using the tool, the technology to be effective. That's kind of what I heard. I really like that. I think that's fantastic. That's a great process to understand what those challenges are, but also how you might be able to approach it.
Video Summary
The Advanced Scheduling and Billing Tactics for Cardiac Device Clinics webinar, hosted by Innovize Consulting founder Mitchell Fong and sponsored by Vector Remote, covers strategies for improving remote monitoring in cardiac clinics. The session features insights from professionals like Joy Lewis of Dignity Health, Nicole Blanc-Butler, and Yanet Pineda from Baylor College of Medicine.<br /><br />Key topics include leveraging technological advancements for remote monitoring, handling recent CPT code changes, and the shift to alert-based scheduling, which enhances efficiency by prioritizing patient visits based on alerts rather than fixed schedules. The panelists highlighted significant improvements, including enhanced workflow efficiency, increased patient connectivity, and improved satisfaction scores.<br /><br />Joy noted the impact of streamlined processes through Vector, citing enhancements in report accessibility and billing, which eliminated manual inefficiencies. Nicole and Yanet discussed training challenges and strategies, emphasizing the importance of technology for reducing manual workloads while improving provider and patient experiences.<br /><br />Success is defined by metrics such as patient and provider satisfaction, efficient workflows, and consistent, accurate billing practices. The webinar concludes with a focus on overcoming implementation challenges through collaboration across teams and continuous improvement in remote monitoring practices.
Keywords
Cardiac Device Clinics
Remote Monitoring
Scheduling
Billing
CPT Code Changes
Workflow Efficiency
Patient Connectivity
Provider Satisfaction
Technological Advancements
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