Eastern Health, one of Melbourne's largest metropolitan public health services, has consolidated its billing systems into a single enterprise-wide system through its partnership with PowerHealth.

The PowerHealth Power Billing and Revenue Collection (PBRC) is now managing the billing for the entire patient journey across Eastern Health's emergency department, inpatient and outpatient, theatre and prosthetic billing, pharmacy, allied health, transition care, ambulatory care, pathology, medical imaging and cardiology services.

Aside from putting up a single billing system, the organisations also worked on setting up an integrated mail house with PBRC to allow the automatic generation of patient correspondence by SMS, email or mail. A hand-held electronic device called PBRC Mobile has been delivered to clinicians for recording services for billing. 

Additionally, the PBRC has been integrated with the health service's rostering system to obtain clinician roster information and to assist in the identification of potentially missed billing for services. The system is also being used for management reporting.

WHY IT MATTERS

Eastern Health runs over 60 facilities that deliver more than 1.3 million episodes of care annually.

In a previous review of its existing system and process capability, the health service found it is not raising some revenues due to process and system complexity. 

It then moved to replace 16 billing systems with a single enterprise-wide billing system that simplifies processes, which has so far brought financial benefits that is 19% above its forecasted figure.

According to project manager Marina Hocking, the PBRC implementation has achieved improvements in patient experience, as well as increases in revenue capture and enhanced operational efficiency. It also supported the quick transition to remote work during the pandemic.

After completing its implementation, Eastern Health is now working to further improve the system's maturity and embed the use of business reports to enable data-led decision-making.

THE LARGER TREND

Another Victorian public health service, Albury Wodonga Health, has also integrated the PBRC solution into its cloud-based PAS. The integration of the billing system is part of its digital transformation following its adoption of the DXC Care Suite platform in 2020.

The Children's Hospital Westmead and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre have also implemented the same solution earlier.

In other related news, PowerHealth and its partner Telstra Health have launched PowerAnalytics, a new digital solution that delivers deep analytics and benchmarking to identify actionable insights across operational and financial performance in healthcare.