Hope Cancer Clinic decided to onboard CureMD All-in-One Solution as their new EMR and Practice Management vendor when their existing legacy application could no longer keep pace with their growing practice. CureMD’s award-winning EMR and PM application, combined with Revenue Cycle Management Services, replaced all the gaps in the workflows by streamlining and automating patient registration, clinical charting, chemotherapy management, and claims processing.
Dr. Naik established Hope Cancer Clinic as an independent medical center to provide state of the art oncology care for his local community. Since 2000, the practice has been available as an environment to promote patient wellness by involving evidence-based medicine, applied research, and hospitality-inspired service into treatment and care.
Hope Cancer Clinic is a private outpatient medical oncology office in Metropolitan Detroit area of Livonia, MI. They are dedicated to serving patients and their loved ones with compassionate, state of the art, and comprehensive cancer care.
CureMD evaluated and analyzed the needs of Hope Cancer Clinic based on their existing workflows. A phased implementation approach was applied based on the complex uni-directional interface with the hospital EMR to exchange X-rays, Lab Results and Patient Consults.
Challenges
Dr. Naik’s ultimate goal was to promote excellence in cancer care by helping practices create a culture of self-examination and improvement. The practice collectively made the decision to switch to CureMD, since this was clearly not possible with their previous EMR vendor. CureMD closed the gaps in care by establishing a smooth process in operations through advanced features of the chemotherapy management such as:
- Customizable Plan of Care
- Evidence-Based Chemotherapy Regimen Library
- Clinical Decision Support
- Safety Alerts
- Order Management
- NCI’s CTCAE Based Adverse Event Documentation
- Automated Drug Dosage Calculations (m2, /kg, AUC)
- Drug Utilization Forecasting
- Provider Note Templates
- Therapeutic Class Based Drug Indexes
- Integrated Charge Capture
- Advanced Reporting
- Flowsheets
- Platinum Certified e-Prescribing
- PACS/DICOM Imaging
During Phase I of implementation, the CureMD Team discovered serious performance issues in the practice. The in-house application provided inaccurate and unreliable patient reports, while the accounts receivables were staggering.
Moreover, their internal revenue cycle system was not automated so the users were manually tracking transactions.
After a series of CureMD product demonstrations, Hope Cancer Clinic decided to automate and streamline its operations through the use of CureMD’s web-based system for practice management and billing services.
Hope Care Clinic has also dramatically improved their practice’s reporting capabilities. They have often appreciated the fact that now reports are accurate and timely. Everything is instantaneous. They can easily generate reports within seconds as opposed to the past when they had to wait several hours and that too for a report which, in many cases, wasn’t always accurate.
CureMD has proven to be a phenomenal tool for developing operational policies and procedures throughout Hope Cancer Clinic. Through workflow changes and a better understanding of the billing and claims collection process, the health care delivery was able to expand dramatically over the past years. By joining CureMD, they were able to expand their operation.
Benefits
With CureMD, the practice was able to:
- Provide state of the art personalized cancer care to each patient closer to home.
- Work with the patient and family to reach individual treatment goals.
- Empower the patients with knowledge through patient’s education after every visit.
- Spend more time with the patients and their family and less time in documentation.
CureMD has greatly helped them provide comprehensive services from pre-treatment to long term follow-up. Some examples are:
- New patient consultation
- Prompt evaluation and treatment initiation Second opinion
- Advanced outpatient oral and IV chemotherapy and IV antibody therapy
- Outpatient biological therapy and oral and IV targeted therapy
- Outpatient bone marrow aspiration and biopsy
- Extensive educational literature
With CureMD they are able to concentrate on their excellent staff which has understanding and compassion to attend to the needs of the cancer patients.
The treatment options are individualized using the latest information and anti-cancer drugs available today. The treatment protocols are constantly updated to keep pace with the new developments.
The treatment plan is coordinated with appropriate surgical and/or radiation specialists, whenever combined treatment is necessary. Hope Cancer Clinic is able to maintain high standards for all aspects of patient care and has extensive networking and access to comprehensive supportive services including inpatient care, outpatient care, support services, treatment modalities, clinical trial availability and multidisciplinary team involvement and assessment.
Dr. Naik said that CureMD is a special brand of care and inspiration. In the past several years he became disillusioned with EHR vendors. CureMD was able to miraculously help him out of those issues.
After CureMD, transparency and growth could be ensured easily. This made submitting claims and monitoring claim status throughout the enterprise quite convenient. The staff was automatically notified when claims were denied by a payer and why, so they were able to resolve the issues quickly and resubmit the claims. With greater transparency into the billing process, Hope Cancer Clinic could identify trends and patterns that helped generate “clean” claims the first time around, something not possible with the previous system.
CureMD facilitated the use of practice’s existing EHR and PM software to optimize care coordination, patient engagement and quality measurements.
