UBMD

When a patient visits a hospital for surgery and rehabilitation, the resulting paperwork is touched by many hands: the nursing floor, which calls the rehab office; the secretary, who prints the demographics, calls the doctor and sends the paperwork; and the physician, who evaluates the patient and sends a hard copy note to the back office to begin the billing process.

This paper-based routine—and the errors it can create—are on their way out for UBMD doctors.

UBMD is launching a physician information system that can be accessed “on the go” with mobile handheld devices. This winter, 15 doctors from pediatrics and rehabilitation medicine will be testing the system’s wireless billing capabilities on cellular phones. The two practices plan to provide the software, called Patient Keeper, and the phones to their remaining providers sometime in early 2009. From there, UBMD will make the system available to other interested practice plans and physicians within UBMD.

The two “smartphones” chosen for the pilot are the AT&T Tilt and the Palm Treo 750—both of which run on Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system. The Tilt has a large touch screen with slide-out keyboard, while the Treo has a thumb board and smaller touch screen.

Charge capture, or billing for physician services, is the first UBMD internal process to test Patient Keeper. Phones installed with the software allow doctors to complete and send all relevant billing data to the proper office instantly from their phone, wherever they are seeing patients. No paper exchanges hands.

This electronic data is interfaced into the GE Groupcast (IDX) billing system. Patient Keeper is designed to work across different legacy computer systems, organizations and data environments. That’s a good thing, given the spread of UBMD physicians across several hospitals and other clinical locations. Compatibility with both ECMC and Kaleida information systems is critical to this project, as much of the initial patient data is collected by the hospitals.

“This is one step forward in improving physician communication and health data transfer,” says Tak Nobumoto, director of operations at UB Associates. A market leader that integrates well with GE, Patient Keeper was recently named one of seven technologies that could change health care by Forbes magazine.

Once comfortable with the technology, UBMD physicians can avoid the paper-based constraints of capturing patient demographics and charging for services—especially for in-patient situations—that can result in lost revenue. “We expect to see a positive return on this investment within a year,” says Nobumoto. Funding for the phones will vary by practice.

Smartphone users will also have access to calendar, email, contacts and Web browsing functions. In addition, text messaging appears to be a significant improvement on the current pager method of communicating with other providers.

“We just distributed the phones and I’ve already heard some compliments,” said Rick Fusani, IT projects coordinator for University Pediatric Associates, at an initial software demonstration in October. “They seem to be excited about using email and text messaging.”

Three other Patient Keeper software suites may be rolled out to smartphone users depending on physicians’ reactions to the pilot this fall.

—Lauren N. Maynard