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Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter by Kay Aesthetic Dermatology™ is a skin care treatment center based in Southern California. The center provides comprehensive skin care treatment that includes clinical dermatology, cosmetic dermatology, plastic surgery, clinical research and histopathology laboratory services.
For over 10 years, Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter has successfully partnered with CompuGroup Medical in its quest to provide the highest possible patient satisfaction in the delivery of care. The center treats about 14,000 patients a year, each with multiple visits averaging 6.5 a year.
Ruben Cota, Executive Director of the Center, has been with Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter since it started with CGM CLINICAL 11 years ago and has helped mold the center into one that is recognized as one of Southern California’s most innovative and comprehensive skin care treatment centers.
In congruence with the goal to position Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter as a state-of-the-art facility, the center purchased CGM CLINICAL as the software solution that would help them achieve this.
Through a systematic approach that Ruben refers to as “Process Engineering”, the center has been able to leverage CGM CLINICAL to increase efficiency, optimize revenue through effective charting rapid claim collection and create the best patient experience possible.
CGM CLINICAL’s broad set of features gave a boost to the center’s efforts to improve revenue and patient satisfaction by enabling customization of clinical templates, procedure codes, reporting module, scheduling templates, reasons for visits and exam rooms. Ruben attributes the center’s success with CGM CLINICAL largely to the advanced user training that was provided to him.
“Everyone who is serious about utilizing the functionality in CGM CLINICAL to its full extent should attend CGM’s super user-training sessions,” says Ruben.
Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter expects to receive the highest possible score for charting in a recent audit of its surgery center by the Accreditation Association for Ambulatory Health Care (AAAHC). Impressed by the center’s success, the surveyor mentioned to Ruben that the detailed level of charting allowed in CGM CLINICAL is superior, he further commented that his own clinic would benefit from such a system.
Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter’s attention to patient experience is paying off. The Center has observed a consistent monthly average of approximately 150 new patients.
Ninety percent of these new patient visits are generated by referrals from the center’s existing patient base. Ruben attributes this high referral rate largely to the center’s overall patient satisfaction where the ability to keep wait times short is a major component.
CGM CLINICAL’s tools for patient flow and reporting are instrumental to achieving this.
To keep track of wait times in an open and transparent manner, the clinic displays the current Patient Flow Work Area on a 45-inch TV monitor that is mounted at their nursing station.
The Patient Flow Work Area is a virtual office in CGM CLINICAL that visualizes the number of scheduled patients, patients in the waiting room - including wait times, patients in exam rooms, and patients waiting to be checked out.
The center’s staff is able monitor how they are doing easily and where patients are bunching up in their workflow.
“The Patient Flow screen in CGM CLINICAL allows all of our providers to visualize patient flow through the practice, at all times. This ultimately helps us manage our time with patients to make sure that we’re always on track in meeting with patient expectations, providing timely service and ensuring that patient experience for each visit is at the highest possible level. In fact, our high patient satisfaction level results in a lot of new patient referrals which of course, is good for our business,” says Dr. Sire, the center’s founder.
One other advantage of using CGM CLINICAL as a software solution is the ability to apply a pro-active approach to managing both patient and payer accounts receivable.
CGM CLINICAL’s functionality allows for a quick view of aging AR buckets on a dashboard. This helps in the identification of who owes money. Based on dollar amounts and age of claims, action is taken as needed. The center has reported a superior average monthly claim payment rate of 15.4 days with an overall monthly average rate of only 21 days.
As a result of this high level of efficiency, the center seldom sees AR accounts age past 90 days. In addition to this, a steady 80% collection rate is maintained for charges.
Ruben and his team utilize CGM CLINICAL’s sophisticated reporting capabilities to track their total monthly charges and payments. Many clinics have the ability to report their total monthly charges, but CGM CLINICAL also gives users the ability to make comparisons between charges and payments. Additionally, payments can be broken down to show amounts paid by patient and payer and further analyzed by other key elements.
Armed with this powerful information, the center was able to renegotiate their contracts with top payers in their favor, leading to an increase in revenue. They achieved this by agreeing to lower payments on CPT codes that were infrequently used while negotiating a significant increase for their most frequently used and most profitable CPT codes.
“Properly prepared implementation (process-engineering and change management) is crucial to the successful integration of our new Burbank clinic with our existing successful business model. By choosing to take advantage of our existing implementation, with minimal setup of course, we expect significant efficiency improvements, increased profitability, and increased patient satisfaction to be achieved in a short time frame,” says Ruben.
As a testament to the center’s success in delivering state-of-the-art skin care treatment, Advanced Skincare Surgery & MedCenter will attest for Meaningful Use (MU) Stage 1 at the close of 2013.
