Winning the Inpatient Census Battle Need Not Be All Consuming

Your productivity is under assault – mountains of paperwork are raining down on your practice, creating a barrier that’s standing between you and your passion for patient care.

And there, atop the blockade, is the ultimate insult – inpatient census management, which stretches out like barbed wire. This continuing battle to manage your hospital-bound responsibilities has, like a tornado, swept up everything in its path in your efforts to bring order to the chaos. Before you know it, office staff, nurses, and maybe even your spouse or children, are trying to help you juggle this impossible task.

For practices that split their time between office and hospital, this lament is all too familiar. Managing that inpatient census and the related charge capture responsibilities are an unnecessarily complex process that seems to be an ever-moving target. 

Too often, non-clinician office staff are called upon to help doctors manage their way out of the morass, coordinating hospital rounding when they should be checking in and out patients, handling incoming calls, dealing with insurance issues – you know, things that are the lifeblood of an efficient practice.  

Falling into the Gap

Though it’s tempting to enlist your office staff as foot soldiers in the battle, hospital rounding is far more complex than meets the eye. More than just recording data on a list, it’s a dynamic and ever-changing dance that includes taking down critical information, conveying that info to the providers in a HIPAA-compliant fashion, and pinpointing exactly where each patient stands in the paradigm of hospital care. 

Of course, you could add dedicated staff to handle charge capture and hospital rounding – but at what cost? Your ratio of FTE (full-time equivalent) employees to providers is a useful predictor of practice efficiency, and adding more support is a short-term-gain, long-term-pain proposition.  

Think about the cost implications of all this extra responsibility. As the cost of operating a practice continues to rise and reimbursements continue their steady decline, this becomes an assault on your profit margins in addition to your time. An expensive proposition, indeed!

Better Process, Less Staff

Integrating workflow and charge capture software represents an ideal solution to a chaotic problem. You’ll gain myriad instant benefits, including greater organization of your hospital charge capture process, redefinition of roles, and essentially reduction of overhead. 

With the transparency and rapid exchange of information facilitated by charge capture software, everyone’s job gets easier – most notably, your own! Now, you have clear visibility of the overall census and who has been seen already, in real-time. 

Equally important, the burden on the support staff is lifted. Their role becomes streamlined, making it less likely that more staff will need to be hired to manage the inpatient census. In some cases, the number of office employees dedicated to this process goes down, allowing them to be reassigned to other duties. 

Adopting smart solutions for complex problems helps practices scale without needing to add expensive resources, keeping overhead at a manageable level. The cost of running a medical practice, be it rent or human resources, continues to rise, forcing owners to be mindful about adding more expenses. Leveraging modern software solutions that understand your world will definitely help.

For A Better Hospital Rounding Experience

At HybridChart, we provide technology that connects your healthcare team, increases efficiencies, AND improves your bottom line. HybridChart’s cloud-based software adapts to your practice’s unique workflow and will improve your profitability and patient outcomes by utilizing our 5 features: charge capture, census management, secure messaging, discharge planning, and data analytics.

NEVER miss another charge and get PAID for the work you do!

If you are interested in taking your medical practice to the next level and want to employ the best hospital charge capture practice available in the industry, come visit our website at www.hybridchart.com, call us at 1-877-977-5544, or click here to schedule a demo today!