Embracing Technology and Innovation for a Bright Future
As The Centers for Advanced Orthopaedics, one of our greatest strengths lies in unified diversity. We have 23 unique divisions working together to preserve the private practice model of patient care, and such a wide variety of doctors and specialties that our patients can be seamlessly treated for all of their musculoskeletal needs. At the organizational level, the business of The Centers is only enhanced by our many keen administrators, offering a variety of management systems and recommended strategies.
Likewise, as we consider the technology needs of each practice and our group as a whole, we view the diverse practice management and electronic medical record systems, along with other technologies, as an asset. Our goal is, and has always been, to smoothly integrate these platforms to share data across practices, saving the significant time and financial investment it would take for every division to transfer to the same system.
Where it makes sense to utilize one technology or vendor throughout divisions, we’ve moved forward and used our size to great advantage in negotiating best-in-the-industry rates. For example, we recently selected MedStrat as the preferred vendor for PACS software, which will allow us to capture and view radiology images while providing economic storage and convenient access to all of the data across divisions. Their eagerness to work with us allowed for a tailored package that will save $700,000 in system implementation fees.
Right now, we are working with a software company to finalize a hybrid system that will share both electronic medical records and data from practice management systems across all divisions. We have all been looking forward to this milestone as a way to integrate our data in real time and create a fluid patient experience, especially as it pertains to automatically sharing patient records with other practices when we refer patients to each other.
In addition to that, we are working to develop technology that will mine and review the data from all the EMR and practice management systems. As we know, the future changes in healthcare law with the Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) will require us to provide evidence that our work as doctors is clinically effective and cost-efficient. The technology we are developing will enable us to capture patient information and examine data across all divisions. This will give us the opportunity to review our work from an organizational level, developing best practices to treat patients better and identifying the most cost-effective solutions that can be implemented at each division.
And, rather than filling out generic forms developed for primary physicians and multi-specialty practices or health systems – with quality measures that are not useful for orthopaedics – we have chosen instead to create our own registry for reporting this data under the PQRS reporting requirements. This will uniquely position The Centers to develop the quality measures that will be truly useful in our industry. We are able to do this only because of our size and resources, and are working with a consultant to ensure we identify and report these measures in the most effective way possible. We are also eligible to increase our reimbursement from Medicaid with this measure, whereas other methods would potentially lose up to 6 percent in Medicare reimbursement.
These technologies will make our integration smoother and more advanced, while also providing us the opportunity to be leaders among our orthopaedic peers. If we choose to personally work with programmers or technology companies to develop additional proprietary software, we may also have the opportunity to market this technology to other companies and health systems across the country to better the healthcare model and patient care. As appropriate, we are also looking to provide the potential for investing in our technology or in technology companies we may partially own, for those of us who would like to be so involved.
As the partners and employees of The Centers, we share a deeply entrepreneurial spirit. All of us either started our own business or joined a small, private practice, and that mindset continues to influence everything we do. Now, we have the benefit of size and influence to back our ideas and initiatives.
Moving forward, we have the opportunity to expand our efforts promoting high-quality patient care beyond the individual patient-doctor interactions. We have already begun some public policy and advocacy work, and our focus on cutting-edge technology will enable us to provide better care to our patients.
The combination of diverse viewpoints and a unified strength in numbers is powerful indeed, and has already given us opportunities in everything from negotiating prices to public policy initiatives and to developing patient centered technologies. I look forward to leveraging this even further to the benefit of not only our patients, but patients across the United States.
- Subir Jossan, Prince William Orthopaedics, Hand Surgery & Sports Medicine Center