IT boosts case management efforts
by Bernie Monegain, Editor
03/01/07 ENGLEWOOD, CO

Centura Health, one of Colorado's largest group of hospitals and healthcare services, is among several healthcare organizations that have recently turned to technology to improve case management.

Hospital-based case management's patient-centric approach places one person in charge of coordinating all phases of patient care from admission through discharge.

Lisa Camplese, a nurse and vice president of clinical quality and care coordination at Centura, says IT is a must-have for efficient patient case management and discharge planning.

“You can put together a clinical review summary in a matter of minutes,” she said.

 “It provides a snapshot of what's happening day by day as they progress through the hospital stay,” Camplese said. “It provides payers with justification for why they need hospital care.”

Case management is playing an increasingly critical role in hospitals and is being recognized as vital by hospital administrators, putting case management directors in a better position for IT funds to leverage decision-making and increase staff productivity, said L. Greg Cunningham, CEO of the American Case Management Association.

“Case management's ability to improve quality while adding to the bottom line makes it an influential and depended-upon service,” Cunningham said. “Therefore, more budget monies have been allocated to case management.”

Cheri Lattimer, executive director of the Case Management Society of America, agrees. Morever, she said, case managers are being recognized by key players in patient care and today play a more collaborative role than ever.

“It is through these collaborative ventures that case management will be acknowledged as the glue that ensures care coordination in a progressively more complex healthcare maze,” she said. IT is playing an increasingly important role, she added.

Centura operates 12 hospitals, eight senior residences and home care and hospice services. A few months ago it rolled out case-management specific technology developed by Chicago-based ECIN (Extended Care Information Network).

At about the same time ECIN also signed on two divisions of the Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Atlanta-based Emory Health System, St. Louis-based Barnes-Jewish and Christian (BJC) Health System and the Oklahoma University Medical Center.

ECIN provides Web-based technology that helps coordinate fragmented health services and utilization information into a single screen, which then communicates automatically to payers and post-acute care providers.

Automating post-acute facility referrals eliminates the cumbersome and costly process that has a case manager or discharge planner wasting hours every week phoning and faxing to secure post-acute care services one provider at a time, said ECIN CEO Jeff Surges.

Instead, the ExtendedCare Professional application sends a detailed electronic referral across ECIN's proprietary database of 86,000 providers and interested facilities reply – often within minutes.

“By automating the entire process, we expect to decrease the manual time and effort involved in completing paper-based forms and communicating via fax and phone to our payers and post acute care providers, leaving more time for our clinical staff to focus on patient care,” Camplese said.

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