Struggling rural hospitals look for ways to access needed technology
One success story is the Colorado Rural Health Center partnered with Cyberscience Corp. to speed up processes, a move that has saved time and money.
LAS VEGAS – The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, legislators and others discuss ways to change current regulations to give rural hospitals technology that rivals what the large health systems have, according to Patrick Yount, director of HIT at the Colorado Rural Health Center.
Rural hospitals are closing and more are in danger of shutting their doors as margins shrink and federal regulations hamstring critical access hospitals from changing the way they do business.
"Technology provides us the larger area of margin, the largest area of improvement for providing value to the care provider," Yount said during a business intelligence session at HIMSS16.
One success story is the Colorado Rural Health Center partnered with Cyberscience Corp. to speed up processes, a move that has saved time and money, Yount said.
[Also: As rural hospitals struggle, some opt to close labor and delivery units]
Cyberscience systems are able to pull data from the hospital's old and new systems, extracting data and automating reports, such as inpatient and outpatient measures necessary for the Medicare Beneficiary Quality Improvement Program, Yount said.
"The current process is mining charts to pull information in middle ware called the CART tool," Yount said. "It's cumbersome and full of flaws and inefficient. Using Cyberscience, we were able to develop a report and put it into CART. The process went from a week to four hours."
The benefit is real time access to data.
"We can submit the data directly to people who want to see it in real time," he said.
And patient quality has improved.
[Also: More than 200 rural hospitals are close to closure, iVantage study claims]
"Using the report we can drill into the encounter and see what's happening with the patient," Yount said.
While numbers are not yet available, hospitals in the system are already starting to see savings in the return on investment. The program will soon be available in the clinics.
The auditor told them this year, Yount said, that if the information had been available last year, Colorado wouldn't be in the middle of an audit.
More than 60 rural hospitals have closed since 2010 and another 210 are vulnerable to closure, according to iVantage Health Analytics.
Twitter: @SusanJMorse
