Operation Samahan recently allowed Uversa to document and analyze their ClearHealth implementation process and successful results. They have now been live for almost year and with an additional 6 months of use on the early version of ClearHealth. You can view the case study online at our website or you can download a glossy PDF.
Look for a lot more successful clearhealth installations and stories as we have more than 20 multi-facility organizations committed for 2006. The complete text of the case study has been posted in the body for easy viewing.
Great thanks go to Operation Samahan for their patience and cooperation in bringing this together. As a courtesy please do not contact them directly so that there resources can be allocated to patients, we will be happy to forward any requests or correspondence via email at clearhealth at uversainc dot com or call us Toll Free at 1-877-UVERSA8
Operation Samahan is a four facility community clinic organization based in National City California. Samahan is a Tagalog word which means working together, and that has been their goal from the start. It was founded by a group of Filipino doctors, nurses, and other health volunteers who sought to help Filipino seniors who did not have the finances, linguistic skills, or confidence to navigate through the health care system.
In 1973, in a tiny barbershop somewhere in downtown San Diego, the first Filipino community clinic was born. And on December 4, 1973 Samahan was established as a 501-C3 corporation. Thirty years later, what started out as a project ran by Filipino volunteers for seniors and elderly turned into a diverse, multi-service health center serving low-income families of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds throughout San Diego.
Operation Samahan currently operates several growing clinics. These range from Women’s care, A Teen center, Senior care, General Practice, Dental, and Administrative Facilities. They offer an array of premier services to all age groups. Operation Samahan had a key organizational goal to take control of their information technology to control costs and support rapid growth. A major part of the initiative was to replace their aging Mega West practice management software. Because of their previous experience with proprietary vendors and solutions they opted for the Open Source ClearHealth Suite.
By adding more features and capabilities to ClearHealth, Operation Samahan has been able to take a hands on approach and drive the software that is the backbone of their organization.
Operation Samahan began looking at alternatives to their Mega West system in late 2004. This included consideration of an upgrade to Mega West from Companion Technologies to their latest version. Ultimately Operation Samahan selected ClearHealth from Uversa based on several key factors.
* Direct-to-payer billing without service or per-claim fees. Reasonable migration and installation costs with no or low long term costs and pay-as-you-go support.
* A growing list of features and enhancements they could benefit from and participate in driving without additional cost.
* Multi platform compatibility without secondary license fees. (They opted for Linux/Apache/MySql/PHP which fit well with their existing IT.)
* Comprehensive EMR features with user drive reporting and form building.
Operation Samahan Vital Statistics
Specialties: General Practice, Geriatrics, Womens Care, Teen Case Management, Dental
Locations: Metro San Diego California
Number of Physicians: 10
Number of mid level practitioners: 4
Total staff: 70
Patients seen per physician per day: 30
Encounters per year: 48,000
Percentage of un/underinsured: 80%
Servers: 5
Wireless solutions: Laptops
Total Desktops: 95
Document Senders: Kyecera-Mita Copiers
Planning
Operation Samahan’s migration to ClearHealth has taken about 12 months. From initial conception to the current production use the approach was to move incrementally and deliberately which is a reflection of how theymanage their organization.
One critical decision that was made was to approach the ClearHealth implementation as a software development project rather than an off the shelf installation. Operation Samahan identified, funded and advised on the development of several key features. Using this developmental approach Operation Samahan was able to take advantage of a pay-as-you-go cost structure.
Along the way Operation Samahan also chose to implement tadditional ClearHealth modules. These included VOIP Phone integration (using Uversa Next Generation Voice) and document storage integration with there Kyocera-Mita copiers. Their ClearHealth workflow makes extensive use of the ClearHealth DocSmart Module through these copiers as well as directly from Desktops.
Funding
The first step in bringing ClearHealth into production was to migrate data from a temporary data base they had used to contain patient demographics, and to import organizational provider and billing information from their Mega West System.
Operation Samahan elected to run their Mega West System in parallel with ClearHealth to ensure billing continuity while users were being trained and technological issues were resolved. To improve the accuracy of their patient records, each time a patient visit occurred their record was fully completed. The initial import from their Mega West System had brought over only limited demographics.
Making the billing transition proved stressful as California Medicare delivered a surprise deadline at the last minute to shut off their billing capabilities with Mega West System. Uversa and Operation Samahan worked closely to get billing live with ClearHealth and were successful in avoiding disruption to their cash flow. They always maintained a very high approval percentage on claims and has been able to improve this further with the advanced and automated tools in ClearHealth’s billing module.
Lessons Learned
* Leave plenty of time to arrange, test and complete payer setup
* Importation of data only offers real benefits when the original data is high quality
* Existing processes may have been molded by limitations in previous software, processes should be updated to reflect best practices
* Hardware and operating system upgrades at the start of the deployment can make later maintenance easier and less disruptive
Looking Forward
Within the next 3 months Operation Samahan will be rolling out these additional ClearHealth modules…
* Real time lab result integration with Quest labs
* Case management module for external referrals, job placement, and social work
* Additional EMR modules for chronic care/episode of care
* Additional phone integration with the Uversa Next Generation Voice suite