Eagles Landing Family Practice
The Client
Eagles Landing Family Practice features 11 locations and 45 care providers serving families in the Atlanta metropolitan area. It is the largest independent health care company of primary care providers in the state of Georgia, and is known for its keen focus on increasing the quality of care and enhancing efficiencies through innovative use of their eClinicalWorks® electronic health records and practice management system.
The Situation
Primary Care practices and physician groups find themselves in a challenging segment of health care. These groups typically serve as the “home base” for a patient’s overall health and wellbeing, while governmental programs such as MIPS, MACRA and PCMH require them to engage in increased data collection and reporting – functions that don’t provide revenue to the practice or its providers. The key to thriving in this environment is determining how to best leverage electronic health records and practice management systems, build technology to interface with these systems, and develop workflows that will increase efficiency while improving care and communication.
The Client's Need
Eagles finds itself in the midst of rapid, yet deliberate growth, and recognized the need to put systems in place to better manage population health and improve the way its practices communicate with patients to ensure that care is delivered promptly, accurately and consistently, and in a way that delivers value to both patients and the practice itself. A high level of automation and customization was required to achieve this goal, and it was quickly determined that Eagles’ needs and vision were quite different from how a typical practice uses eClinicalWorks®. In fact, they were originally told what they were trying to do wasn’t possible. That’s when they turned to Ero Health.
How Ero Helped
The Eagles vision for how they wanted to leverage their eClinicalWorks® system to grow their practice and do business in a smarter way was quite advanced and involved a variety of different technology platforms. At a high level, the work Ero Health performed for Eagles included custom reporting, integration and automation of data with programs such as Salesforce and other third-party organizations and softwares. But it’s the details behind the purpose, functionality, and customization that make these projects so remarkable.
- Data Integration – The Ero Health team integrated eClinicalWorks® data into Salesforce to trigger patient communication and activity tracking to help ensure patients were on track with appointments, testing, and other items critical to their overall care and health. In addition, this process integrates with the DASH scheduling system to allow for enhanced patient scheduling options.
- Predictive Analytics – In order to initiate the various patient communication points, Ero Health developed processes within eClinicalWorks® to calculate when those communications should happen and trigger the activity.
- Custom Reporting – Eagles found that certain modules and registries, such as the CDSS section were quite limited, and the process of creating custom registry alerts was not so straightforward. Ero Health created reporting that would address these needs, and produce the alerts and outcomes needed from the system.
- Opportunity Capture Reports – Providing great health care involves ensuring patients are getting the tests and procedures they need. To accomplish this goal, Ero Health created opportunity capture reports to track whether patients were actually going in for routine tests such as mammograms or other health screenings, or one-time procedures they may need. Not only does this make for better overall care, it also makes good business sense in monitoring captured and lost opportunities, and putting systems into place to increase capture rates and track the associated revenue generated.
- Automation – A primary goal for Eagles was to automate as much as possible, creating systems that would auto-populate data, flag issues, and generate alerts. One such automation revolves around PQRS reporting, in which codes are auto-inserted into the billing data. Ero Health also automated the process of payment posting within eClinicalWorks® directly from their third-party patient payment portal. This eliminated the need for manual data entry and streamlined the process.
The Results
Through the various projects implemented by Ero Health, Eagles Landing Family Practice has been able to bring their vision to life in terms of leveraging eClinicalWorks® to grow their practice – both organically through patient satisfaction, and financially through increased capture rates and more efficient processes. They’ve substantially increased their monthly billings across the practice and have been able to focus their staff on patient care and communication activities to better serve the population.
