PRODUCTS
|
|
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK HEALTH SCIENCE CENTER BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Executive Summary – Administrator’s Viewpoint
The following interview was conducted with Robert Golonsky, Associate Administrator of OPD and Dialysis Services, State University of New York Health Science Center at Brooklyn, before Velos was installed.
Velos: What is the "value proposition" of Velos Renal from a clinical and business perspective?
Mr. Golonsky: "I think I can give
you a compact answer to that question. The clinical and business
benefits are interrelated. From a clinical perspective, we need a
system that follows the patient from the time we find out they have
renal failure, on into dialysis, if appropriate, then on to
transplant perhaps, and, unfortunately, often through the time the
patient expires. The goal is to have a full history of the course of
renal disease for each patient so that we can better predict what we
might need to do for each patient to improve their treatment or
reduce costs with equally favorable, or better, outcomes." "Even
though all our patients have renal disease, the reason for them
getting renal disease is varied. We need to be able to evaluate each
patient based on their particular disease situation and then
determine things like: Did we reduce the number of times a patient
had to be admitted to the hospital? Were we able to give them better
care outside the hospital by doing certain aggressive things? Is
where we're putting our money paying off?
“These are
decisions that mean everything to everybody, whether from the
patient, the physician, or the financial perspective. And this is
the same information we need for managed care, which is also where
the business perspective comes in. We're hopefully doing the right
thing in most cases, possibly not in others. Getting all this
information would be very labor intensive without a system like
Velos Renal."
Velos: What makes Velos Renal different
from other systems you may have looked at?
Mr. Golonsky: "I haven't seen any system that has taken this
idea of following the patient all the way from beginning of their
disease all the way through; so immediately, Velos Renal has a heads
up on everybody else because no one else I've seen is looking at the
problem that way. You have systems for physicians offices, you have
systems for dialysis facilities; none of them integrate the
information and enable you to do a lot of data manipulation without
going to a lot of different places and putting the information in,
say, a statistical package, which is very laborious. It’s the
integrated approach Velos Renal takes and that's heads over anybody
else."
Velos: What are the challenges of interfacing with the hospital system?
Mr. Golonsky: "I think the problems are relatively minor; it's primarily a matter of
passing data from one system to other. Some programming is involved."
Velos: Can you compare how you handle billing now with how you'll handle it with Velos Renal?
Mr. Golonsky:: "We use the hospital billing system. Getting information to the hospital is the challenge. We're paper-based and collect the information by hand. It involves a lot of transcribing and rewriting, and obviously errors occur when you have to redo something, take a photocopy and mistake a five for six, that sort of thing. By far, the vast majority of the work involved in billing is collecting the information off charts and the various other paper sources. All this will be taken care of for us by Velos Renal "
Velos: Thanks, Bob.
|
|
