Client Story
One Patient, One Record — Wise Health System partners with Altera Digital Health to improve documentation and capture missed revenue
Wise Health System implemented Sunrise Financial Manager in 2019 (its first activation was on the acute side in August 2018) for both acute and ambulatory services. Before the implementation, the hospitals and physicians’ offices ran on different systems, creating challenges in effectively managing accounts receivable. With Sunrise Financial Manager, Wise created a singular, integrated patient record. Moving to the philosophy of “One Patient, One Record,” physicians who split their time between seeing patients in the hospital and ambulatory offices could properly document all procedures performed, regardless of location.
“From a physician standpoint, they’re busy, and they had to document procedures performed at the hospital before they went back to the clinic for the rest of the day,” said Lynn Giddens-Branscom, Vice President of Revenue Cycle and Audits at Wise. “If they don’t have a good system in place to communicate what they did at the hospital, you’re going to miss a lot of notes and charges. By having an integrated platform, it allows us to better document what they do on the acute side and put processes in place so that we’re capturing all the revenue and billing for it.”
One patient, one record, complete data
Improved communications produced better documentation while helping capture missed charges and revenue
Established a telehealth system that captured financial data for a COVID-19 drive-through testing site in 14 days
Reduced costs and promoted a healthier environment by enabling financial staff to work from home
Improving efficiency for frontline workers
The benefits of Sunrise Financial Manager extend beyond physicians. Wise’s frontline staff members cite Sunrise Financial Manager’s ability to easily update accounts through various stages of the revenue cycle process as one of their favorite features.
Previously, if billers received an edit for a modifier, they would use the hospital email system to notify the coder and then log the requested edit into a spreadsheet to keep track of the responses. But with Sunrise Financial Manager’s custom attributes feature, billers can update the attribute and it is automatically sent to the coder queue, reducing coding errors and ensuring its progress is tracked and managed.
Another standout feature of Sunrise Financial Manager is its ability to enable data diving-mining data, generating reports, identifying trends – in a system with the flexibility to quickly implement necessary changes as a result of what’s learned from that data. “It has provided us with the agility to respond to various circumstances, most recently the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Giddens-Branscom. “Because of how Sunrise Financial Manager is configured and built, it made it very easy for the IT team that supports me to quickly make the changes that were needed.”
With Sunrise Patient Financial Manager, Wise set up a telehealth system and COVID-19 drive-through testing sites in just two weeks, an unprecedented turnaround for services during an evolving and stressful event.
Benefits beyond capturing revenue
Sunrise Financial Manager enabled staff to work remotely during the pandemic, helping them remain healthy and safe while saving office space in the process. “You often hear that ‘time is money,’ but in some facilities with a lot of space, space can be money as well,” said Giddens-Branscom. “We were laying the foundation of moving our billers and collectors to remote staffing before the pandemic, but because of the functionality of Sunrise Financial Manager, we were able to do it much quicker, thereby saving money by saving space.”
Finally, as with all Altera products, Sunrise Financial Manager comes with a strong partnership with Altera. “The overall [Altera] experience really lends itself to the overall patient experience that Wise hopes to provide for our community,” said GiddensBranscom. “We’ve worked through this together, and it’s never felt as if we were left out on our own to figure it out. It is really a true partnership in addressing our issues and helping us make the best decisions for our organization. If I had to review the same products again, I would still choose the product we chose with [Altera].”
FREE EBOOK
Reshape healthcare: Six billing practices to optimize your organization