Process optimisation – how to successfully guarantee revenue for hospitals

27/05/2022 Industry Insight

Process optimisation – how to successfully guarantee revenue for hospitals

Author: Sabrina Meyer

If you think of hospitals, the first image that comes to mind is probably patients who are in pain or have some problems and need to be treated as quickly as possible. Then there are the doctors and nurses offering treatment, who have to rush from one patient to the next and guarantee the medical care. However, a hospital is far more than just that. A hospital is a business – it is a company that earns and spends money, but particularly has to make profits in order to safeguard its continued existence in future.

The challenge: to eliminate additional costs

In addition to its core business, a great deal of time is lost dealing with administrative activities in everyday life at hospitals. Accounting for services that have been performed and coding cases normally take place manually and this is very demanding and labour-intensive work. This is no easy task for the members of staff and they have to respond to the challenge again on each occasion.

Documentation and coding

Accounting for services accurately and promptly is extremely important for any hospital. The data that has been documented is crucial in determining its economic success – and this in turn safeguards the hospital’s future. It is therefore absolutely imperative that the data that has been entered is correct. This is not an easy task in the light of the stress that doctors and nurses face in their daily work. If the documentation is incorrect, this can lead to declining income and harm the hospital. The accounting process also involves coding patient cases. This means determining the service that has been provided on the basis of different kinds of information about the patient, for example, their age or sex, and this is then assigned to a code. The more time it takes to document the individual cases, the less time there is to provide the patients with medical care.

It is therefore necessary to ease the pressure on the medical and non-medical staff in their everyday work and find a better solution.

Completely transforming the process

The manual accounting processes for services that have been provided and the coding of cases are time-consuming and prone to errors. It is therefore important in a first stage to digitalise and automate these manual processes within hospitals. Hospitals have made vastly different levels of progress in this regard. Some of them are very advanced and already have digital patient files, among other things, while others are only just launching this procedure. Service companies need to recognise this difference and engage with the hospitals at the right point in order to achieve the most efficient results possible.

„Our services can provide significant relief for hospitals and guarantee revenue. When switching systems, our employees handle the sensitive data carefully at all times and support the hospitals in a professional manner during the entire process.“

Claudia Hobohm | Managing Director of MIA

Process optimisation with support from service companies

The basic medical data from the patient data is used when switching processes to digital accounting. If the information is available in digital form, it must be read and interpreted in order to achieve success for the hospital.

Service companies such as MIA (Medial Information Analytics) can read the patient data and use it in the right context. It is then possible to issue invoices that reflect the services that have been provided on the basis of AI (i.e. with the help of artificial intelligence). MIA supports hospitals in this process from the outset. Right from the time that a patient is admitted, the documentation is mapped simply and in digital form for the doctors and nurses. MIA reads the data during a first stage and then transfers it to the hospital’s programmes using software.

Guaranteeing revenue thanks to artificial intelligence

Processing the patient files then takes place much more quickly thanks to the centralised processes and the digital analysis of the data. As manual tasks are eliminated, the hospital’s employees save significant amounts of time. This provides relief for their administrative tasks and, thanks to the cooperation arrangement with MIA, they can then fully concentrate on their core tasks again and provide care for more patients. This means more services that can be provided and documented for the hospital – and this in turn increases revenue.

info_outline

Award-winning medical controlling: MIA Medical Information Analytics won gold at the German Innovation Award

In September 2019, MIA was founded as a start-up. Only two and a half years later, in May 2022, MIA won the German Innovation Award for its automated process solutions. This award is presented annually for particularly innovative products or solutions that offer real added value for users. With the automatic documentation of patient data and the coding of cases, MIA ensures the timely and correct processing of files. This allows the hospital to document and bill more services, which secures revenue and relieves the medical staff in their daily work.