Ventura Orthopedics
The Client
Ventura Orthopedics has been serving patients in the Ventura County, California area since the 1930’s. As one of the oldest group practices in California, Ventura Orthopedics has six locations where patients receive care from board certified physicians, physician assistants, and therapists for general orthopedics, sports medicine, joint replacements, pain management, and more. For more information, please visit www.venturaortho.com.
The Situation
The backbone of any Physician’s practice is a robust electronic health record (EHR) application where their patients’ demographic and clinical information is stored, scheduling is maintained, and the revenue cycle is managed. Many practices opt to partner with a hosting vendor or managed service provider to support their EHR needs. In this scenario, the vendor must demonstrate not only technical expertise with the EHR and its hosting requirements, but also trust, reliability, and transparent communication. All of these characteristics are critical to the successful partnership between a practice and a vendor. This is especially true when a catastrophic event occurs.
The Client's Need
Ventura Orthopedics found itself faced with the scenario that no practice wants to experience: their hosting vendor had experienced a total system failure, bringing the practice’s operations to a halt, endangering patient care and placing millions of dollars of revenue in jeopardy. Over 350 employees, including 83 providers across six locations, were impacted by the failure. They needed to get back up and running as quickly as possible to continue servicing the community.
How Ero Helped
On a Friday evening, five days after the failure, Ventura leadership sought the advice of Ero Health. The practice had already recognized Ero Health’s exceptional expertise with eClinicalWorks® and approached them with the question: “What would it take to get our practice online and functional again”.
IT Director Travis Quine met with the Ero Health team to begin assembling a plan for building a temporary environment to allow them to continue patient care and process claims. Speed and accuracy were key, as surgeries were being cancelled, walk-in patients were denied, and claims could not be submitted – all of which impact the safety of their patients as well as the practice’s cash flow.
The team at Ero Health went into action immediately to outline a two-phased solution to provide access to eCW in a temporary environment, while simultaneously building a permanent hosting solution with full disaster recovery and redundancy. It was crucial to execute quickly on the initial phase to get the practice functioning. The temporary environment allowed the practice to continue treating patients, prescribe medications, and process claims. Ero Health and Ventura Orthopedics engaged the practice’s eClinicalWorks® strategic account manager to temporarily move their software licenses and SPI numbers to the temporary environment. The team also worked with TriZetto Provider Solutions to design a process for the practice to resume claims processing as quickly as possible. Ero Health leveraged their team’s expertise and worked over the weekend to build a temporary environment that the practice could access by Monday morning.
On a parallel path, Ero Health continued to design and build a dedicated virtual private server environment to eventually host the practice with real time replication and full redundancy.
A high level of technical expertise with eClinicalWorks® was necessary to advise on the build of the temporary environment properly (knowing that it would ultimately be merged) and allow the practice to resume operations as quickly as possible. Ventura Orthopedics was beyond satisfied. One provider stated, “eClinicalWorks® has never been this fast,” and demonstrated their surprise and satisfaction.
The Results
Because of the new partnership with Ero Health, Ventura Orthopedics was able to quickly resume patient care and claim processing, despite the critical system failure they had endured. The group was able to again see patients and document within the system. Ero Health restored the ability to bill and post payments, allowing the practice to return to full cash flow.
Following the rollout of the temporary eCW environment, Ero Health built the permanent, dedicated eCW environment, which resides in Ero Health’s HITRUST certified data center. All clinical information captured in the temporary environment has since been merged into the dedicated environment. Ero Health also leveraged their RCM team to re-enter roughly 10,000 claims that needed to be transitioned to the permanent environment to properly maintain their accounts receivable.
The practice is fully functional, and experiencing a higher level of eClinicalWorks® expertise, system performance, and technical support.
