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Molinette
Hospital Makes
High Value
Breakthroughs
with TrakCare
Hospitals worldwide are looking for ways to solve healthcare’s
care/cost conundrum – how to improve care delivery while also
cutting costs. San Giovanni Battista Hospital (Molinette), in
Turin, Italy has implemented a breakthrough solution to the
puzzle with TrakCare.
One of the largest hospitals in Italy, Molinette treats approximately
60,000 inpatients annually and about 15,000 ambulatory
patients receive healthcare at Molinette every day. The 1400-bed
hospital is also at Italy’s top tier in terms of delivering complex
critical care. One example: about 300 organ transplants and the
same number of bone marrow transplants are performed annually
in this incredibly busy healthcare hub. |
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“The time needed to get patient data submitted for reimbursement has gone from two days to effectively real-time.” -Dr. Claudio Plazzotta, Office of Controller, Molinette.
Maximising value, cutting costs
The combination of large size and care complexity makes it
absolutely essential for Molinette to maximise the value received
from every technology investment. Implementing TrakCare has
enabled hospital executives to achieve that objective.
Molinette utilises the Visual Basic version of TrakCare to
automate virtually all major hospital areas including inpatient,
outpatient, emergency, radiology, day hospital and day services,
resource booking, oncological pharmacy, and order entry. Patient
data is stored in a single, secure electronic patient record (ePR),
which is easily accessible to care providers throughout the
hospital.
Since TrakCare was rolled out, revenues have substantially increased while
costs have been significantly cut, according to Dr. Claudio Plazzotta, who
heads up the Controller’s office at Molinette. For example, the TrakCare EPR
has made it possible to dramatically reduce data lost during the patient
registration process. Since reimbursements from the regional government in
the public Italian healthcare system are directly tied to supplying valid data on
patient registrations, information accuracy is absolutely critical throughout the
complex reimbursement process. As a result of the major reduction in lost
patient information since installing TrakCare, Molinette has cut revenue losses
from 10M to 1M Euros – a stunning 90 percent reduction.
TrakCare has also enabled Molinette to improve the overall quality of
registration data to increase the coding weight specified by the Italian
government from 1.8 to 2.4. In a healthcare system where the average coding
weight of hospitals throughout the country is only 1.3, Molinette is at the top
of the pyramid in terms of the quality of its epidemiological statistics. The
code weight improvement also means a major reimbursement increase from
the regional government. TrakCare has also made it possible to speed up
revenue realisation. “The time needed to get patient data submitted for
reimbursement has gone from two days to effectively real-time,”
Dr. Plazzotta says.
Improving care delivery, increasing user satisfaction
Even more critical than the measurable bottom-line deliverables enabled by
TrakCare are the improvements in care delivery made possible since the health
information system went live. Precious physician and nurse time formerly
dedicated to producing the forms needed for the bureaucratic reimbursement
process has been freed up so clinicians can better focus on activities of direct
value to patients, according to Dr. Massimo Lauretta, who oversees the
hospital’s logistics area. “Before implementing TrakCare, we didn’t have the
data needed to support the implementation of needed changes in the care
delivery process,” he says. “TrakCare provides the objective data needed to
make physicians accept process changes.”
Molinette nurses are also pleased with the value they perceive is being
delivered by TrakCare. Trained users reported a 96 percent satisfaction rate
in terms of TrakCare meeting expectations, based on a Molinette survey.
Future plans call for using TrakCare to make clinical and administrative
information more accessible than ever before. “Real-time information delivery,
instantaneous data visibility, high performance, and 24-hour reliability make
TrakCare a high-value success,” Dr. Plazzotta concludes.
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