HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS CHALLENGES YOU FACE

Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance

Not surprisingly, HIPAA will be the top concern for Healthcare Organizations for the next two years. Some of the ways AVENUES assists organizations to achieve HIPAA patient security compliance:

• Role-based security levels by record type and field.
• Patient security levels by team and specific providers.
• Complete historical patient record Access Logs including user, type of access, date and time of access, length of access, and station.

Financial

Poor documentation results in lower reimbursements. With AVENUES’ medical record system, you will achieve quality documentation and substantiate continued stay requests through:

• Content prompting.
• Guided and templated documentation.
• AVENUES unique Audit for compliance with documentation criteria and Work Flow Notifications.

Improving Operational Efficiencies

In a recent study, providers spent as much as one minute on paperwork for every minute of patient care. Organizations need to find innovative ways to reduce paperwork while maintaining quality documentation and coordination of care.

• Improved productivity requires a shift toward more patient contact time without sacrifice in medical record quality. With Content Prompting and Guided Documentation AVENUES improves the efficiency and quality of treatment documentation.

• AVENUES’ unique Patient Chart Viewer allows staff to easily navigate and review the patient’s entire chart with various sort options and time slice options.

• AVENUES' unique internal communication system, which includes Clinical Mail, Task Manager and News Viewer, improves the efficiency of staff communication while maintaining the security of the patient information.

• AVENUES unique Alert Manager and Instant Messenger automatically notifies all appropriate staff of significant events: For example, prescriptions that are greater than 25 days, unsigned doctor’s orders approaching 24 hours old, staff with more than 10 past due records/tasks in their task list, or patients with 10 or more special treatment interventions in one month.

Integration

One of the major issues facing organizations today is integrating the various clinical systems.

• AVENUES supports standard data exchange using industry-standard HL7 specifications. These real-time interfaces send and receive patient demographic, encounter, order, and financial information with ADT systems, lab systems, pharmacy systems, and billing systems allowing the facility to choose best of breed products to meet their specific needs.
• The new HL7 version 3 will use only XML encoding. AVENUES is in an excellent position to implement XML messaging. AVENUES XML Workspace allows the user to easily interpret XML messages and store XML data either natively or symbolically in its database. With the advent of XML standards, a good delimited database is the tool of the moment. We are there!

Error reduction

Effective safety management is a process that begins with human behavior. It’s not about managing numbers — it’s about managing systems that proactively affect patient safety. Too often safety efforts are a result of a reaction to fluctuations in incident reports. When the numbers decrease, so does safety-related activity. AVENUES’ Risk Management Reports provide trending analysis that allows organizations to find and remove the root causes of incidents. Instead of focusing on symptoms and "quick fixes," organizations can achieve lasting results. Additionally, AVENUES provides entry level error checking for medications against allergies and interactions.