Right in the heart of Minnesota’s lake country, Mille Lacs Health System serves a population that fluctuates wildly, depending on the month. The warmer the weather, the more cabin owners are in town, which means this small-town health system sees over 20,000 patients annually.
It also means Mille Lacs is large enough to have an overwhelming amount of patient data, but not large enough for a data team of their own.
Fortunately, Amy Ninham, who oversees the revenue cycle at Mille Lacs, has found a data partner that’s helped her automate processes, leverage insights, improve patient quality, save time, and—yes—boost revenue.
“What DTA does is really valuable. Everybody needs data at their fingertips.”
A small system with big objectives
“We’re smaller, and rural,” says Amy, “so we don’t have the dollars to afford Epic that everybody else has.”
Instead, like many smaller health systems, Mille Lacs has had to piece together three separate EMR systems: MEDHOST in their hospital, MEDHOST EDIS in their ER, and athenaPractice in their clinics.
“Each of those systems has its own reporting capacity,” says Amy, “but the issue is when you want to see the full picture of one patient who’s used our services for years. You can’t find it. And it’s not realistic to go into each of those systems and pull the information you’re looking for.”
“We needed to see the full picture.”
In order to impact revenue at Mille Lacs, Amy needed better insights.
“That’s why we brought in DTA,” she says. “We needed them to really just build the infrastructure to support us, with one common area for storing the data from all our systems, so we could pull the reports we need.”
So Amy asked the team at DTA Healthcare Solutions to integrate their systems and support their data needs through an ongoing managed services engagement.
A “build as you go” approach
DTA has done similar work for much larger organizations, but their approach was especially valuable to Mille Lacs..
“We knew Amy and her team couldn’t just stop fulfilling data and report requests while we integrated their systems,” says Kevin Campbell, DTA’s founder and CEO. “No organization can do that. That’s why our team takes a ‘build as you go’ approach instead. We keep the data requests flowing, while we incrementally build a data warehouse at the same time.”
“We keep the data requests flowing, while we incrementally build a data warehouse at the same time.”
Within a few short months, Mille Lacs had an integrated data platform on par with much bigger health systems. Since then, Amy has continued to rely on DTA as an extension of her own team, having them continue to build out the platform and fulfill requests in their ongoing managed-services role.
For Amy, the partnership has paid off.
“We’ve reduced our avoidable write-offs by 60%.”
In her role overseeing revenue, Amy is always looking for ways to prevent human errors, or errors in the process. The industry calls them “avoidable write-offs”.
For many years, the only way Mille Lacs was able to track these was on paper.
“Let’s say Bob came in for an MRI,” says Amy, “and the appropriate process wasn’t followed, so there was no prior authorization. We’d have an adjustment sheet—a piece of paper—that would show an avoidable write-off of $2,000.”
“We had no insight into how much we were actually writing off under the category of ‘avoidable’. Now we have visibility.”
Amy needed a better way to identify and resolve these kinds of errors, especially any that were becoming a pattern, so she asked DTA to write a report that looked specifically at these kinds of write-offs.
With that information in hand, Amy and other leaders were able to implement process adjustments. For one, they hired an RN whose role was to ensure prior authorization for any patient procedures.
“From the time we started looking at the report DTA created to about three months in, our avoidable write-offs had decreased by about 60%.”
The payoff was fast, and clear.
It was clear DTA’s reporting made a difference. But why? “It was because we had visibility,” says Amy.
“We had visibility into what we were writing off, and where,” she says, “and then we could follow up with those departments or managers or directors as needed. Before, we would just kind of make tally marks. We’d say, ‘Oh, yep, they had a write-off,’ and we’d go talk to them, and then everybody would go on with their day.”
“But now you can see it,” she explains. “It’s visible. It’s right there in front of you. You can see trends—and that’s helped us significantly, because then you can dive down and look into the process. You can see, is there a breakdown in the process? Or is it just a one-off? That sort of thing. You could trend it by inpatient or outpatient, or by department. DTA really gave us visibility into where our write-offs were occurring.”
DTA really gave us visibility into where our write-offs were occurring.”
And did this visibility lead to ROI? Did it support revenue?
Amy doesn’t hesitate. “Oh yeah,” she says. “Absolutely.”
According to her, this is just one example of the ways DTA has helped improve operations and efficiency at Mille Lacs. Hiring a managed services team has been a key part of building revenue.
“As a smaller system, we can’t afford to have somebody on staff—we can’t even find anybody—that could just do report writing. And we need more than just report writing. With DTA, we also have Compendium, and the whole data warehouse.”
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