Children's National Health System completes deployment of MedAptus' Pro and Tech solutions

MedAptus® today announced that Children's National Health System has completed deployment of the company's Pro and Tech solutions across its numerous outpatient care locations. The hospital elected to implement MedAptus' dual-code ICD-10 functionality and now has 600 physicians and 400 nurses selecting diagnosis codes from the expanded code set currently not mandated for usage until October of 2015.

Children's National Health System, based in Washington, DC, has been serving the nation's children since 1870. The Children's National hospital is Magnet® designated, and is consistently ranked among the top pediatric hospitals by U.S. News & World Report. Home to the Children's Research Institute and the Sheikh Zayed Institute for Pediatric Surgical Innovation, Children's National is one of the nation's top NIH-funded pediatric institutions. With a community-based pediatric network, eight regional outpatient centers, an ambulatory surgery center, two emergency rooms, an acute care hospital, and collaborations throughout the region, Children's National is recognized for its expertise and innovation in pediatric care and as an advocate for all children.

Children's National embarked upon a search for charge capture technology in 2013 with the goal of converting all of its paper-based processes for both pro fee and facility coding across 40 specialties to a digital approach ahead of ICD-10. After completing the vendor vetting process, Children's selected MedAptus due to the company's track record of success with large deployments and experience working with pediatric hospitals.

The MedAptus team brought 1,000 Children's National end-users live in a matter of months. Despite the physicians learning new software as well as a new coding vocabulary, most were trained on a one-on-one basis, in under 45 minutes. Reception to the MedAptus suite of ICD-10 search tools has been strong with providers gravitating to the patent-pending MedAptus "search cloud" as well as the self-updating frequently used codes option.

"When we first started working with MedAptus, the ICD-10 deadline was still in 2014 – the date was moved the week we were going live, but we decided to stay on track with our plans. As a result we now have our entire outpatient coding operation in ICD-10 with entered diagnoses being crosswalked to ICD-9 for billing purposes. The feedback from providers has been positive with most finding that ICD-10 isn't as complicated as had been expected," stated Carole Hellmandollar, executive director of ambulatory services at Children's National Medical Center.

In terms of hard benefits, Children's National saw a drop in missing charges after only the first phase of implementation. This is in part due to MedAptus unique cross-reconciliation engine which ensures both compliance and revenue integrity across the technical and professional components of a singular outpatient visit charge.

"It has been especially rewarding for our team to work with Children's National this past year. Not only were they given access to enormously dedicated providers, but they also played a role in what must be one of the largest implementations of ICD-10 technology to-date in the US. We laud the organization for undertaking such a significant business process transformation and expect strong operational and financial benefit to occur with the roll-out now complete," said Gene Schneider, MedAptus president and CEO.