White Papers - Now Available for Download

Many dentists use working interviews as part of their hiring process, but most are performing them illegally.

It’s good to test your applicants’ abilities before bringing them onboard, but you need to make sure you’re doing so the legal way.

Download the eguide, “Making Working Interviews Work,” by CEDR HR Solutions and learn:

• How to perform working interviews the legal way,
• How to interview to get the information you need from applicants, and
• How to test applicant skills without putting your practice in legal jeopardy.

When patients say no to treatment because of the price tag, it costs your group thousands of dollars in lost revenue every month.

Establishing a solid patient financing system and effectively presenting to patients will help boost your profitability and ensure patients can afford the treatment they need. Here are five reasons patient financing is key to any DSO’s success, along with tips to help dentists, practice managers and treatment coordinators effectively present financing options to significantly increase the group’s profitability

Many patient financial portals claim to deliver price transparency. So why are patients still in the dark?

Download our whitepaper and learn:

• Ten criteria to securing patient-facing price transparency for your organization
• Long-term strategies for authentic patient financial engagement

Like most healthcare systems, managing and minimizing supply chain costs is paramount for The Polyclinic. Previously, their manual process was inefficient and often failed to provide the right supplies for care providers at critical times.

Learn how The Polyclinic has:

• Streamlined its supply chain
• Reduced inventory turns, carrying costs and expired materials waste

“If a doctor or nurse reaches for a syringe, the expectation is that it will be there, and it’s a big deal that we currently have a 99.4% fill rate,” says Jeff Wall, materials manager at The Polyclinic

The industry’s ongoing transition from fee-for-service to value-based healthcare requires that hospitals and health systems be more clinically focused and fiscally responsible than ever before. A healthcare organization must understand the total costs associated with caring for individuals and communities, deliver quality care aimed at achieving the best possible health, and realize financial results driven by exceptional patient outcomes. This requires an approach to Value Analysis that includes integrated teams, a comprehensive scope, and a strategic planning framework.

In this paper, you will learn how to:

• Design a Value Analysis program that moves supply expense management from reactive to strategic
• Develop a culture of accountability and achieve engagement across departments
• Achieve evidence-based clinical integration with meaningful, actionable analytics

Until recently, The Cleveland Sight Center’s Accounts Payable department was reliant on paper and manual processing. With its antiquated system, the organization faced a number of issues, including delayed approvals and payments and costly inefficiencies.

After exploring a number of automated payment options, CSC chose KeyTotal Invoice and KeyTotal Pay, powered by AvidXchange, and were immediately able to streamline invoice processes and approval workflows. KeyTotal Invoice enabled CSC to view invoices in real-time, while KeyTotal Pay’s paperless payment process dramatically reduced the amount of time and money spent on manual payments.

Today, CSC is experiencing greater efficiencies and dramatically lower costs. Read the entire CSC success story and see how KeyBank automated accounts payable solutions can benefit you.

While the CMS chargemaster requirement may have been well intentioned, many find it impractical to implement. What’s worse, it’s not solving the patients’ price transparency problem. Learn from innovative CIOs to see how augmenting your core EHR can streamline the process to meet the requirements and patient needs.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about:

• Secure momentum within your organization to drive the patient personalization & transparency conversation
• Gain critical lessons learned so you can develop a straightforward, efficient integration with your EHR.
• See how 2 leading providers innovated beyond the chargemaster requirements to meet the overwhelming patient demand for REAL transparency through self-service tools that reduced costs and increased overall collections.

Community hospitals are juggling the needs of providers and staff, addressing shrinking margins, and sustaining community relationships. However, an EHR makes it possible to meet all of these challenges while still keeping up in the rapidly changing world of healthcare.

 Improving outcomes and reducing cost for the treatment of sepsis patients while enhancing your Antimicrobial Stewardship Program is a challenge. Faster antimicrobial susceptibility results can improve patient outcomes and quality measures. Technology is available today to achieve these goals, but it must be justified to administration. Learn how three leading healthcare institutions successfully positioned the need for change and how statistically significant quality improvements were achieved post implementation.

Benefits are:

• A reduction in patient length of stay
• A reduction in days on antibiotic therapy
• Faster time to optimal therapy

Sometimes you need expert advice - not from a vendor, but from actual peers who have successfully deployed single sign-on (SSO) and strong authentication at their hospitals. In this paper, IT executives from various hospitals give advice to those who are contemplating the implementation of SSO and strong authentication. What follows are 20 valuable tips for the successful procurement, implementation and deployment of these solutions.

Tips include:

• Understand your clinical workflows and engage users early on.
• Determine where and how SSO should fit into your IT security strategy.
• Understand how the solution you choose works with technologies from other vendors.

Hospitals and health systems are constantly challenged to grow revenues and reduce costs. At the same time, they must meet the differing demands of fee-for-service and value-based environments. To be successful, it’s critical for providers and administrators to have effective systems to measure, standardize and align physician performance with their business goals.

This white paper shows how an enterprise-level platform that integrates with multiple EHRs to readily capture, share and analyze clinical, financial and operational data can deliver measurable ROI no matter the setting. Executives from a variety of healthcare organizations share how they’ve benefited from delivering actionable data in real time to physicians and executives.

You’ll see how intelligent data and platforms can:

• Seamlessly connect data throughout the system and care continuum
• Optimize provider workflows to reduce administrative burdens and improve productivity
• Maximize fee-for-service revenue while supporting value-based initiatives

Using the case study of Blockbuster and Netflix, Regent Surgical Health examines healthcare parallels in a new white paper. The story of these competitors offers six key “lessons learned” that have relevance today for health systems looking to leverage new technology, data, customer preference, and care delivery models to lead healthcare into the future.

Learn:

• How to avoid penny-wise mis-steps that cripple customer satisfaction
• How business strengths can drive innovation complacency
• About a new technology poised to propel ASCs beyond the tried-and-true

The consumerism revolution in healthcare continues well into the new year. With the recent CMS price transparency rule and increasing out-of-pocket costs for patients, innovative health systems are realizing the need to create a consumer-centric patient financial experience to respond to the rapid changes.

Patients want and expect an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand solution when it comes to paying their healthcare bills. St. Luke’s University Health Network recognized they needed to strive for a patient financial experience that met the standards that Amazon and other major online retailers have trained consumers to expect. This motivated St. Luke’s to invest in their patient financial care, which in turn resulted in positive results in collecting, building patient loyalty, and overall long-term organizational growth.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about:

• How to address the critical challenge of healthcare affordability
• Enhancing the patient financial experience through easy-to-use and easy-to-understand solution that drives results
• Empowering patients by providing access and tools

Patients are increasingly behaving like consumers in a healthcare setting. As a result, they expect enhanced services and experiences when engaging with providers and health systems. How can health systems engage patients in an integrated effort that aligns with strategic goals to improve patient outcomes, improve efficiencies, reduce costs and enhance patient satisfaction?

This white paper examines important conditions and trends driving consumerism, evidence of the economic and reputational value of a positive consumer experience, examples of health systems successfully improving the patient experience, and a Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies approach to working with health systems to embrace the new era of consumerism.

Reducing unnecessary clinical variation presents a considerable challenge for hospitals and health systems, but it is a challenge that needs to be overcome. Unwarranted variations in care not only adversely affect care quality and outcomes but can also cost hospitals millions.

Operating rooms are substantial cost centers for hospitals and health systems, making them a prime target for clinical variation reduction efforts. Optimizing surgical performance and OR utilization can yield better outcomes for patients and better financial results for providers.

Read this white paper for a breakdown of best practices for optimizing OR management and surgical care.

Learning points include:

• The role of data in performance optimization
• How to identify top performers and leverage their expertise to raise the performance of others
• How to leverage outside resources to improve surgical care

Healthcare organizations have significant pressure to deliver improved care at the lowest possible cost and healthcare leaders are increasingly being pressed to improve financial, clinical, and operational performance in new ways. This white paper looks at why hospitals are underperforming and why the traditional way of fixing problems may no longer be viable. It also provides insight on how hospitals can remain competitive by using a data-driven, integrated, and cross-functional approach to driving operational and clinical performance improvement that results in sustainable outcomes.

Key learning points include:

• A more effective and modern approach to improving performance
• Thinking outside of the traditional siloed approach to remediation
• The importance of data in identifying, prioritizing, and remediating opportunities for improvement
• How to put your data to work to see trackable and manageable results
• Four steps to drive quantifiable and sustainable improvements in cost per case, length of stay, and quality performance

The healthcare industry's transition to value-based care models makes it more important than ever for hospitals to work closely with post-acute care providers to improve patient outcomes and reduce readmissions. Many hospitals struggle to reduce readmissions due to a lack of real-time, actionable data from skilled-nursing facilities.

To gain access to the same data SNFs have in real time, many hospitals are turning to Real Time Medical System's platform and improving their clinical and financial performance as a result.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about:

• Common challenges hospitals face in managing a post-acute SNF network
• How hospitals are using real-time SNF data to reduce readmissions by 50 percent or more
• How a Pennsylvania health system achieved savings and reduced readmissions by building a program around real-time SNF data

A survey of nearly 300 healthcare executives uncovered the top workforce management initiatives to balance clinical and financial outcomes. This white paper takes a closer look at the five key strategies that are elevating care quality and driving down labor costs through better workforce optimization.

Key advancements in real-time healthcare and advanced data analysis present a significant opportunity for health systems to push patient safety initiatives into the realm of proactive healthcare.

A new Bernoulli Health white paper, Continuous Clinical Surveillance: A Real-Time Solution for Comprehensive Patient Safety leverages peer-reviewed research, literature reviews, market analysis and use-cases to demonstrate how broader utilization of continuous clinical surveillance can help clinical teams proactively anticipate the early signs of opioid-induced respiratory depression, sepsis, unplanned extubation and other costly hospital-acquired conditions by capturing an evolving portrait of a patient’s condition in real-time.

Key learning points include:

• How continuous clinical surveillance works and is distinct from patient monitoring
• The multi-dimensional benefits of real-time patient safety in the areas of early intervention, length of stay, alarm fatigue and clinical decision support
• The foundational role EHRs play in how hospitals innovate with continuous clinical surveillance

As healthcare organizations’ experience with value-based care matures, they need comprehensive capabilities to meet the needs of multiple populations with varying acuity levels. Supplementing EHRs with advanced PHM technology and a ‘Scalable Care Management’ approach provides the proactive and longitudinal insights health systems need to optimize scarce resources by developing a coordinated ecosystem of tools and programs to meet the care needs of multiple types of patients over time.

Learn how this approach helps with:

• Managing patients that aren’t receiving care
• Flipping the delivery model to be more patient-focused
• Getting results through an integrated, multi-channel care solution

HIMSS Analytics (part of Definitive Healthcare) surveyed 323 clinical and IT leaders at HIMSS19 and online to find out how prevalent clinician cognitive overload is, which healthcare technologies are contributing to it most, and how to solve the problem.

In this report, you’ll learn:

• Signs and symptoms of clinician cognitive overload healthcare leaders are observing most frequently
• Technology-based tasks that contribute most to the problem
• Technology improvements leaders say would help the most to reduce clinician cognitive burden

Leading hospitals are improving patient care quality and ED patient experience while relieving overcrowding.

Innovation and transformation don’t just happen. To improve the way acute care is delivered, high-performing EDs are turning to a new approach that employs three innovative solutions:

• Telehealth: Expand service offerings by making specialists available via telehealth platforms.
• Integrated Teams: Increase throughput efficiency by integrating emergency and hospital medicine teams.
• Urgent/Teleurgent Care: Relieve pressure on the ED by directing patients with less severe conditions to urgent or teleurgent care services.

Every healthcare organization has a similar set of goals: Improve the coordination of care to enhance the patient experience and patient outcomes, while reducing costs. It’s similar to any industry - make the best product possible. Provide better service than your competitors. Increase margins and revenue. Healthcare differs slightly, at least, in the non-profit sector, where maximizing profit is not a primary goal - but working to maintain a viable margin is important, and challenging.

What organizations from other industries have learned is that new processes only take you so far – success requires a high-performance culture. Healthcare is unique in that organizations readily share their strategies and keys to success. So why can’t every organization replicate that success and why hasn’t the entire healthcare system made more progress? Is culture the barrier?

This paper briefly explores what we mean by culture, and why healthcare organizations find it difficult to create the culture they envision. We’ll also provide practical advice from leaders working on the front lines of building new, high-performance cultures for their organizations you can use today.

Key Takeaways:

• Why you should care about building a strong culture
• Why culture change is difficult in healthcare
• Practical advice from leaders driving culture change in their organizations

In today’s competitive market, it is more critical than ever to attract and retain top talent.

Read the article to learn key strategies on reducing the staffing burden, including:

• Talent acquisition
• Retaining and engaging rehab talent

Lean Healthcare principles can be an invaluable tool in helping hospitals and health systems improve operational, financial and clinical performance. This is especially true in emergency departments that are often ripe with opportunities for process improvement that can enhance throughput, metrics, quality of care and patient satisfaction. Emergency department staffing and operational excellence have been cornerstones of TeamHealth’s services to hospitals since 1979.

This white paper will show you more about the ways TeamHealth worked with Montgomery, Alabama-based Baptist Health to use Lean Healthcare principles and tools to make dramatic improvements in emergency department clinical and operational performance.

Hospitals have a responsibility to protect patients from harm, and as patients become more aware of their options when it comes to health care, they seek facilities that have a demonstrated commitment to patient safety. Lima Memorial Health System has made concerted efforts to expand on its infection prevention protocols since 2014, including the implementation of UVC disinfection.

In this case study, you will learn:

• How a community rallied together to protect patients
• Lima Memorial Health System’s approach to implementing and sustaining a successful UVC disinfection program
• Advantages of choosing the right UVC partner

Today’s OR leaders must ensure all workflows and equipment are delivering a positive impact in relation to efficiency, safety, cost, space and sustainability. These factors are especially important, and often overlooked, when examining surgical fluid collection and disposal systems.

Serres’ experience powering more than 40,000 cases each day has led us to develop updated solutions that vary based on the amount of fluid collected. Rather than use the same system for every case, we found that efficiency, safety, cost, space and sustainability are heightened when solutions are optimized specifically for the amount of fluid volume produced by each surgery.

Key Takeaways:

• Approximately 2/3 of all cases produce less than 2 canisters of fluid waste, and would be considered low fluid volume surgical cases. These cases require a closed collection and disposal process that is more efficient than a high volume disposal system.
• Many healthcare facilities are overusing fluid collection and disposal systems designed for high fluid volume cases, which is both costly and wasteful.
• Disposing of filled canisters as red bag waste can contribute to unnecessary costs and OR turnover inefficiencies.