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COMPREHENSIVE DIALYSIS CENTER
WILLIAMSVILLE, NEW YORK
Administrator’s Viewpoint
The following interview was conducted in March 2001 with Ms. Gail Hamm, Chief Administrator for Comprehensive Dialysis Center (CDC), a 25-station, 175-patient dialysis center based in Williamsville, New York. Velos provides a seamlessly integrated clinical, administrative, and financial system that supports medical care from the treatment event through claims processing. In this interview, Ms. Hamm speaks about her experience with Velos.
Velos: What are the major value additions you get from the Velos system?
Ms. Hamm: In a sentence,
we’re able to give better quality care to our patients. It’s that
simple. The reason for this is the availability of the treatment
data readily at our fingertips. We look at the different indicators,
the adequacy, and the lab values, the venous pressures, all those
kinds of things. These are far more available to us than our
previous system. It’s really helped us a lot.
Not only can do
we get this information while we’re doing bedside care, but we can
download all the data into spreadsheets and do as much or little
with the information as we want. We spend a lot of time with
Continuous Quality Improvement. There are many treatment guidelines
set out for the dialysis centers. With Velos, we’re able to have
better goals and make the improvements to meet them. And, that’s our
goal.
On the financial system side, I’ll tell you I’m very
impressed with it. Velos Financials is a very inclusive package and
does just about everything we need it to do. While dialysis billing
has a narrow window of billable codes, within that window it tends
to get very complex with all the insurance changes, the take-backs,
and pricing changes. Velos Financials accommodates all of these
features very nicely for us. I really like it. It’s very
user-friendly, now that we’re used to it. And again, the reports
that it generates are very useful and easy to generate. I have no
complaints about the financial system at all. It’s made our lives a
lot easier.
Everything in Velos is really not
labor-intensive. The information that you need can easily be found,
and you can convert all of the data into a spreadsheet. At the CDC,
we do a great deal of data collection and review. Over the years
we’ve done it all manually. Velos has saved our managers a great
deal of time. Velos is very efficient for us.
Velos: What were the challenges in rolling out Velos?
Ms. Hamm: We are a very busy unit. To stop production and train
staff was not an easy task and most staffs do not like changes. So,
they’re resistant to a new system at first. In addition, we went
from a relatively unsophisticated system to a much more
sophisticated system. Many of the staff had limited knowledge of
computers. So that was a major challenge. It’s really important to
train the staff and give them as much time as possible to practice
with the system and run practice sessions before going
live.
Velos: Did you look at any alternative vendors?
Ms. Hamm: One of our medical directors is
familiar with several different programs that are out there and he
suggested that we look at Velos. So, we went on a little field trip,
saw Velos and were really impressed with it, even though the product
was then in an early stage. The fact that the data interface was
already developed for our Althin dialysis machines was also a major
part of our decision making.
Velos: Can you describe life”before and after” Velos?
Ms. Hamm: Before, we did
have a computerized system but it was a database that we couldn’t do
much with. It was data in but you could never pull anything out. The
system was also very slow. The daily back-up process was extremely
cumbersome. It often took six to eight hours every night and it was
less than reliable. It was not uncommon for our old system to crash
and be unavailable for patient care.
With Velos, I don’t know
what it does to purr, but it purrs very nicely. We don’t have these
problems with Velos. The back-up process is without problems; it
happens automatically at night and if it takes an hour, that’s a
long time. This system runs so much smoother. The staff – they don’t
see what’s going on in the background, but that’s where I used to
get all of my headaches from. Not so with Velos. It is a really easy
program to run and doesn’t take a lot of maintenance to run. It just
runs itself, basically. My life is a whole lot
easier.
Velos: How do you feel about the service provided by ASI (Automated Solutions Inc., a Velos customer support partner) and Velos?
Ms. Hamm: The support received by
ASI has been outstanding, from the initial training down to the
day-to-day needs of our unit. Their response time has always been
appropriate to our needs. When the problem is critical, they will
drop everything and work on it immediately. Things that are not
critical are addressed in the order of their importance. Would I
like to see the minor enhancements sooner, sure, but doesn’t
everyone. Enhancements are just that – enhancements. We would all
like to see things done sooner, but when it comes to needs and
corrections that are necessary to the day-to-day functioning of our
unit, ASI and Velos have always been very attentive to our needs.
They’ve been great.
Velos: Any other comments?
Ms. Hamm: I really like the data control
that we have. We use it a lot. And, we really look at patient
outcomes. If the patient outcomes are better, there are fewer
hospitalizations, fewer complications and less potential for lost
revenue. We look at that on a weekly basis. How many
hospitalizations we had, and what could we have done to prevent that
hospitalization and improve our patient outcomes. Velos gives us
access to the data we need. Prior to Velos, it was very
labor-intensive.
The other feature that I really like about
Velos is the charge-capture. Basically, if a medication is given,
it’s captured. Our old system didn’t do that well. It was necessary
for someone to review all of the charges to prevent any charges from
not crossing over to the billing program. With Velos, you don’t have
be that diligent: if a nurse documents that a med’s been given, it
comes over to the financial system and the charges are always in
there. In Velos, the med list is available at the time the
medication is given. The appropriate dose and codes are available so
that there is no error. The correct charges are then assigned or
captured in the financial system. That part of Velos is really
great.
For a center our size, even if we assume the majority
of medication billings are correctly downloaded, you could easily
miss a sizeable amount of billable revenue per month just in
medication billings. If you look at the total cost of implementing
Velos, one can argue that the system pays for itself within a year
for that one feature alone.
Velos: Thank
you.
About Velos
Velos is a leading designer and developer of next-generation healthcare
information systems. Velos offers an integrated suite of clinical,
administrative, and financial products and technology, bridging
legacy and net-centric architectures. Velos licenses its turn-key
solutions and technology, together with consulting and systems
integration services, to healthcare providers, systems vendors, and
other industry suppliers. Velos is privately held with headquarters
in Silicon Valley.
For information regarding Velos, please contact Madalynne Chapman (510-608-5744 / mchapman@velos.com
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