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Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula Improves Cash Flow, Regulatory Compliance with McKesson ’s Horizon Patient Folder document management solution.

Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP) is bucking the national trend toward sliding hospital profits and rising costs. With it’s health information management (HIM) personnel and all 325 physicians using McKesson ’s Horizon Patient Folder document management solution, the California hospital is benefiting from major improvements in cash flow, regulatory compliance, expense cutting and patient care. These benefits and more have assisted the organization through the use of technology to position itself for success in today’s challenging environment.

Installed seven years ago, the McKesson solution replaced paper-based HIM processes across the 15-facility healthcare system. As a result, CHOMP quickly reduced days not final billed from six days to two-and-a-half days, greatly accelerating reimbursement and generating a cash benefit of more than $4 million. CHOMP credits the document management solution with more than $250,000 in annual staffing and supply cost savings. When the organization installed a clinical system in 2004, the Horizon Patient Folder solution integrated seamlessly. This enabled CHOMP to achieve interoperability, a key to healthcare IT success in the industry today.

“With Horizon Patient Folder, our medical and administrative teams can access and manage the full legal medical record across our enterprise from a single system, which means more efficient processes and complete access to critical information,” said Madelyn Burke, CHOMP’s director of HIM. “The system also gives us confidence that we can successfully handle the demands of increasingly complex regulations and requirements presented by dynamics such as HIPAA, CMS audits and the economic stimulus.”

Tom McNamara, chief information officer at CHOMP, recalls when physicians had to sort through stacks of paper records to sign patient charts. Now they can access everything from deficiency work lists to wound photos securely through the clinical system viewer or on their laptop at home.

“ McKesson ’s document management solution is so tightly integrated with our clinical system that any movement between the two platforms is smooth and seamless for our physicians,” said McNamara. “We’re benefiting from an ongoing return on investment in the form of unprecedented workflow efficiencies, cost savings and cash flow.”

“The interoperable design of Horizon Patient Folder enables seamless integration with virtually every clinical system on the market today,” explained Bill Kloes, vice president and general manager for Document Imaging, McKesson Provider Technologies. “We’re motivated by the fact that our IT and integration experience is enabling healthcare innovators like Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula to realize new levels of efficiency and success.”

Source: McKesson

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