Redefining Workflows to Achieve Sustainable Results
Situation
Moffitt Cancer Center is dedicated to partnering with patients and their families to provide a quality experience. The center recognized a need to redesign front-end workflows to improve operational efficiency, financial integrity and patient experience. They sought strategies to improve the patient experience while maintaining performance in traditional metrics such as denial write-off trends, abandoned call rates, turnaround time, and other quality and operational indicators.
Approach
For many years, Moffitt performed patient satisfaction surveys in-house by calling patients after discharge and routinely received “excellent” reviews. When the center engaged an outside survey vendor to expand their sample size and obtain benchmarking data, leaders were surprised by the comparative data, which rendered lower scores than expected. While Moffitt’s survey performance was high, they sought to improve its percentile ranking in comparison to other healthcare organizations, particularly on metrics of courtesy and concern of the team.
To address these service issues, Moffitt implemented a comprehensive quality improvement strategy encompassing both systems and staffing. Moffitt added a full-time Patient Experience director and engaged the Patient and Family Advisory Council to spearhead these efforts. In Patient Access, Moffitt developed a quality review and assurance operation for all key areas, implementing productivity metrics and KPIs to improve team accountability to customer service standards.
Through this approach, Moffitt sought to accomplish the following:
- Integrate quality assurance into Patient Access culture
- Establish accountability among agents for standards of service
- Boost service levels to patients and clinical departments
- Increase operational efficiency with shared access to needed records
Solution
In March 2015, Moffitt Cancer Center first partnered with Vyne Medical to assess departmental processes. Efforts focused on process improvement in Moffitt’s Financial Clearance Unit and Patient Appointment Center. Best practices were implemented and hardwired through supporting technology solutions available through Vyne Medical’s Trace® platform. Moffitt implemented Trace to capture and integrate patient financial data such as benefits, financial clearance and pre-registration information for enterprise access and exchange. Moffitt leveraged this data to assist patients in making informed care decisions, to ensure financial coverage for care and to communicate upfront the cost of services.
Results
Moffitt Cancer Center has achieved excellent results through its comprehensive quality review and assurance operations within Patient Access in part by leveraging Trace for call recording, image capture and electronic faxing. Outcomes are reflected in improved quality, patient experience, operational efficiency, and financial performance.