Alpharetta, GA, January 12, 2010: HealthPort, a top-25 company in the healthcare information technology industry, today announced that Florida Hospital, a 2,188 bed hospital system with eight locations across Central Florida, has begun deployment of their release of information (ROI) technology and service solution alongside the organization’s Cerner® Millennium electronic health record (EHR). Using HealthPort’s ROI Partner Program, Florida Hospital will outsource all medical record request distribution, invoicing and collections to HealthPort while the organization’s internal ROI staff manages up-front functions such as HIPAA privacy and security training, customer service, and document selection.
“HealthPort’s ROI Partner Program has helped us improve customer service: we focus on the front end of the ROI process; create consistent messaging across locations; and ensure the right documents are sent to requestors,” mentions Anne Howell, RHIA, Director of ROI, Florida Hospital. “HealthPort does the rest.”
Once the Florida Hospital ROI staff logs requests and identifies the correct documents for release, they are uploaded electronically from Cerner or scanned into HealthPort’s online ROI system. HealthPort takes over from there and completes the remaining ROI tasks from their centralized processing center in Alpharetta, Georgia. “Having HealthPort manage record production and mail distribution from their centralized facility is a time savings for us; they can print and ship records much faster than we could do internally,” Howell adds.
Finally, at any time, HIM managers across Florida Hospital can see the status of requests and expected delivery dates using HealthPort’s eSmartLog™ and ROI Transmit™ Websites. HealthPort’s ROI technology and online tracking tools have really made it a lot easier for us to see the status of ROI processing and respond to requestor inquiries in real-time,” concludes Howell.
“Before selecting HealthPort’s Partner Program, we seriously considered bringing the entire ROI function in-house,” mentions Margaret Verity, Administrative Director of Health Information Management, Florida Hospital. Verity felt the organization would have better control over the ROI process and could potentially earn some ROI revenue. “Instead we discovered that HealthPort’s shared service approach gives us the control we wanted without the back-end burdens of billing, collections and invoicing—tasks that may not be a natural skill set for HIM professionals,” concludes Verity. Once fully implemented, Florida Hospital will recognize monthly revenue from the ROI process through the Partner Program and receive money back from HealthPort to compensate for their portion of initial ROI processing.
