COMPANY HISTORY
A PROBLEM FOR ONE BECAME A SOLUTION FOR ALL
“AccuReg was not built to mass market. It was built out of necessity at a 250-bed hospital in Mobile, AL in 2003 to solve a pervasive, operational problem that we lived with every day. We had to find a way to improve the accuracy of patient registration data and empower our staff to produce excellent work.”
If you're like I was, in the hot seat of managing a Business Office, Patient Accounting and Patient Access Departments, you understand the damage caused by poor data entry. Talk about garbage in - garbage out! Complaints, all directed at registration... rework and denials costing us tens of thousands every month, and don't get me started about the waste of time and talent of supervisors doing manual quality review on random accounts. The turnover in registration, partly due to the pressure of getting the data right without the tools to get it right the first time. And the reality of patient access... when the waiting room is 30 people deep, it's all about crowd control and speed, NOT accurate registration. But it's accuracy that gets us paid, keeps us in compliance, avoids rework and complaints, and keeps us employed. What a dilemma for Patient Access and Business Office managers!
It's in that real-world pressure cooker that AccuReg was born. Not to start a new product line or revenue stream for a stale software firm looking for the next breakthrough "solution" (usually meaning a money trap), but to solve a real operational problem that plagued us as hospital managers - so much that we just learned to live with it. It was a problem that outside vendors could not understand or see the need to work on.
“So, we built the solution ourselves. A business office and patient access director, figuring it out from scratch, simply because we refused to live with "good enough".”
So, we built the solution ourselves. A business office and patient access director, figuring it out from scratch, simply because we refused to live with "good enough". We started with the top 5 complaint issues from the billing department. We developed a way to automatically audit and report those errors back to the registrar who MADE the error in the first place, BEFORE the bill dropped so the registrar could self-correct the error. We knew they didn't need to be slowed down, but desperately needed a safety net to catch errors and serve them up for correction before any damage was done. We did not expect perfection from humans in that difficult, fast paced environment. Instead we built a fail-safe process that would do wonders for employee morale, training, complaint reduction, and most importantly: back-end results. Manual QA disappeared. Back-end rework of registration errors disappeared, along with our number one complaint from billers and HIM. The clean claim rate went up, AR days came down, and denials due to registration errors dramatically reduced. We took those 5 error types and built over 50 rules in the first few months, and registrars loved it. The only people that didn't like it were the outside collection agencies who had less to work with because we were getting paid the first time around. And maybe the software vendors who overlooked the need. We were definitely onto something, and we kept moving forward.
With error data to track, we began reporting error and accuracy rates by employee, by location and by supervisor - both downward to registration for performance improvement, goal setting and incentives, and upward to senior management to show improvement and the impact of registration to the bottom line of the hospital - never before did executives see and appreciate the power of an excellence in the registration department. It permeated our entire culture, and the value of registration went up in many ways while turnover went down. Automating quality assurance in registration did not solve all of our operational problems, but it had the single largest impact of any process improvement initiative that we implemented during those years at Springhill Medical Center. And you know what? It was fun. In April of 2005, Database Solutions, Inc. was born to meet the growing demand for what we then called "AccuReg". It grew to over 100 hospitals in the USA within its first years, primarily through word of mouth. Unlike any other QA product, AccuReg was truly a grass-roots tool developed for the real world of patient access.
“Today, Database Solutions, Inc. continues that same passion for process improvement and excellence in the Patient Access departments of hospitals around the country.”
We are the only company singularly dedicated to Patient Access that developed a tool to solve a problem that we lived with every day, born in the trenches of patient registration. We still believe that registration QA is more service than software, due to the nature of patient access. So we back up the software with CQI (continuous quality improvement) level service that is second to none. It's important that you know this about us, because it's what makes our product different, okay I'll say it... better... than any QA tool out there. We know Patient Access, and we know QA. With AccuReg in your shop, you won't be disappointed, you'll be amazed... at what YOU can do for your hospital. I guarantee it. And our clients will attest to it.
Thank you for visiting our website. Please contact me or anyone at our service firm with questions or comments, we would love to hear from you!