Multi-Facility Hospital Chains
Healthcare corporations with two or more facilities
benefit from the CostFlex system in many ways. For
example:
- no changes needed - the primary computer
system and software vendor (billing, general ledger,
etc) in each facility can be different
- low hardware costs - the costing master files
can be installed on a single server and accessed using
Citrix or MS Terminal Server
- low staffing costs - a single staff person
can easily maintain the cost master files and perform
the monthly costing for 10 to 15 facilities
- reduced installation costs - the cost
per facility is inversely proportional to the number of
facilities concurrently installed (turnkey
installation!)
- reduced on-going software maintenance costs -
results from having several user staff certified to
support the various modules
- enterprise wide reporting -
facility-to-facility benchmarking is a standard feature
allowing built-in side-by-side reporting
Just the last bullet above will probably pay for the
system alone. Imagine finding the most efficient
facility for each DRG out of a group of 10 to 20 facilities.
Uncover the most efficient physician for each DRG and set
the average of his/her resource consumption as the clinical
pathway for all physicians in all facilities to be compared
against. Compare ancillary unit costs across the
enterprise to find the lowest unit costs. In all of
the above, the marginal costing feature allows hospital
overhead to be ignored in the comparisons so that high
depreciation costs of a newer facility will not bias the
results.
The low staffing costs are a result of building automatic
updating into the monthly import processes. If a new
charge code or a new general ledger account is added, the
monthly import will recognize that it does not exist on the
costing database and automatically adds it. The
CostFlex system operator will run a standard report after
the monthly import to find if new charge codes have been
detected and will run another standard report to create an
excel worksheet for the cost center manager to complete for
the new entries. The excel worksheet is emailed across
town, across the state, or across the country to the manager
and the updated work sheet is imported directly into to
costing master files.
The unit cost per facility of the turnkey installation
project is lowest when all facilities are concurrently
installed. Group training at headquarters or at
regional sites will be scheduled to train cost center
managers on the preparation of the worksheets for their
department ( a 100% study of the charge master is always
part of a CostFlex installation). Group user training
by module will also be scheduled where financial analysts
learn how to set up clinical pathways, organized
benchmarking projects, and learn how to automate and update
payer contracts. While the CostFlex staff always
installs the system, the user can reduce overall training
costs by setting up a "train the trainer" system. This
later can also result in lower support fees if user
staff is certified by CostFlex to field the initial support
call from the facilities. If the certified staff can
not handle a particular issue, they in turn would call our
toll free support line.
