Case Study
EpicCare Ambulatory Specialty Sprints Increase User Satisfaction, Secure Revenue
- Customer: Midwest academic health system
- Challenge: Create an EpicCare Ambulatory sprint program to reduce a backlog of application enhancement requests
Results
- Reduced sequential appointment steps for front desk staff by 50%
- Reduced clinical staff time by 10 minutes per appointment
- Shortened change lag by more than two days
- Reduced denials by 3.4%
Background and Challenge
A large academic health system in the Midwest was struggling to create an EpicCare Ambulatory sprint program to reduce a backlog of application enhancement requests. The organization also wanted to increase user engagement and implement best practices to promote efficiency.
The sprint program required careful planning and execution, especially related to change management, because the healthcare organization shared an instance of Epic with a partner hospital network and the EHR changes would affect that organization as well. Staffing IT and operational team members who could work on the program also was a challenge due to competing priorities.
Solution
Tegria was selected to help launch the sprint program and teach those involved in the program’s creation and management how to sustain it. To ensure buy-in from clinical and operational users, a significant amount of time was spent communicating the benefits of the program and soliciting strong support from each specialty department. The Tegria team then dedicated six to 14 weeks per specialty and, when possible, ran two sprints simultaneously.
Each sprint began with a “blank slate” and assessment of needs from a holistic perspective. The primary focus was workflow enhancements and existing issue resolution. Tegria experts took an integrated approach when assessing solution design with the goal of implementing concrete changes that would improve user experience and organizational performance.
Listening sessions with the specialty stakeholders helped Tegria understand pain points and opportunities for improvement. Information gathered from those sessions were combined with insights from job shadowing, surveys, and Epic signal data to develop a specialty-specific issues list for each sprint. As the project progressed, the Tegria team met regularly with specialty stakeholders to review proposed changes, train users on new workflows, and implement approved changes.
Results
- Reduced sequential appointment steps for front desk staff by 50%
- Reduced clinical staff time by 10 minutes per appointment
- Shortened charge lag by more than two days
- Reduced denials by 3.4%
- Increased same-day chart closures, averaging 18 hours and 24 minutes faster for all five specialties
- Increased estimated monthly revenue by $19,895 by eliminating manual charge entries