Sentara Partnership for Epic Clients
If your facility uses Epic, we are pleased to let you know that we have an Epic-to-E/Point interface. One of our longstanding clients, Sentara Healthcare, entered a partnership with LYNX in June to deploy an interface between Epic software and Picis LYNX E/Point^®. Using the interface will help streamline work as information is pulled from Epic to populate E/Point.
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Impact of Poor Documentation on Physician Intent – Part 1
Physicians may not be aware of the concept of “physician intent”, the importance of clearly documenting why the patient was not sent home, and what the expectations for services are. Hospitals risk reductions in payment when documentation of physician intent is missing.
In order to protect hospitals from lost revenue, the following should be documented.

• Does the emergency physician (EP) expect that the patient will need services exceeding 24 hours? If so, the patient should be admitted. If not, observation status is most appropriate. The Medicare beneficiary policy states that hospitals should have policies regarding admission versus observation disposition.
• The EP should document the probability of something adverse happening to the patient whenever possible.
• The EP should explain the need for diagnostic studies to be done as an inpatient when these are usually outpatient services (i.e., their performance does not ordinarily require the patient to remain at the hospital for 24 hours or more).
• The availability of diagnostic procedures at the time when and at the location where the patient presents.

Using Your Benchmarking Analytics Reports
Knowing how you compare to other hospitals in terms of ED facility visit levels and overall acuity can be useful information for your board of directors, other C-level leaders, and ED staff. Because LYNX has more than 500 clients and more than 21 million ED visits annually, we are able to create proxy benchmarks for ED acuity for comparison purposes. The acuity pool is divided into four sets of averages:

• Low Acuity: inpatient admission percentage less than or equal to 14%
• Medium Acuity: inpatient admission percentage greater than 14% and less than or equal to 19%
• High Acuity: inpatient admission percentage greater than 19% and less than or equal to 24%
• Pediatric ED designation

The quarterly LYNX Benchmark Analytics Report (BAR) assigns your hospital to one of these four acuity pools. Do you know which acuity pool your facility belongs to? If not, contact your account executive for your most recent BAR to find out. Watch for more LYNX Lines articles on this topic or contact product support for any questions at 1 866 295 8858.
 

In this economy, the value of LYNX has become even more important to our clients. While many companies have seen a downturn in sales, we are very fortunate to be experiencing the reverse. This speaks to the strong ROI and increased consistency seen with LYNX revenue management solutions. In the last year, we’ve added over 130 new clients including:

The map shows the LYNX family in the contiguous 48 states (our apologies to our clients in Hawaii who do not appear on this map).

• St. Elizabeth Healthcare with five facilities
• Providence Health & Services with seven facilities
• Sutter Health with 24 facilities
• Hospital Sisters Health System with 13 facilities
• Bon Secours with seven facilities

• New Hanover Regional Medical Center
   

RAC IV Hydration Addressed by E/Point
The CMS Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) in Regions B, C, and D have identified IV hydration as an issue they will be auditing. This puts even more pressure on nursing staff as well as coders to get it right. Fortunately for users, in E/Point version 6.1, LYNX provides a solution with the infusion and injection service charging which prompts users for complete information and automatically calculates the appropriate charges for standard infusion and injection services. The IV site, type, medicine, dosage, start time and stop time can all be documented. The automated CPT result can materially affect the visit level. If you don't see the infusions and injections tab, then you are not on E/Point 6.1. Contact your LYNX Account Executive to schedule a free upgrade in 2010.

Tip for Infusions and Injections
In addition to assisting our customers correctly capture these important infusion and injection charges, there is a little known feature that helps our customers monitor the accuracy and completeness of infusion and injection in patient records and provide retrospective feedback to clinical staff
Click here for more information