Emdeon ExpressBill Services reformats bills into a customizable, patient-friendly bill, while CSC PAPERS takes electronic payments and automatically posts them to the patient’s account. Custom Letters by Siemens is much like First Party Letters, which are collection letters for payments. The difference is that Custom Letters allows more letters to be available and utilizes ad hoc components in order to create a more personalized letter with patient-specific information.

To aid in implementing these applications, St. Luke’s enlisted the help of Pittsburgh-based Stoltenberg Consulting, Inc., which creates an environment for success by working with healthcare organizations to provide a variety of services including project management, implementation support and integration between systems. In addition to providing assistance to guide St. Luke’s through the implementation of the new solutions, Stoltenberg Consulting also helped enhance the medical center’s help desk system. Representatives from Stoltenberg were able to come onsite and work together with the St. Luke’s IT department.

Stoltenberg’s primary focus was to help streamline the processes of St. Luke’s implementation of the new applications and assist its staff with additional manpower and expert knowledge of the products. As Stoltenberg consultants began their work at the facility, they found a number of areas where they could apply their substantial knowledge and expertise in the implementation of information systems.

St. Luke’s decided that moving to a more centralized database would prove extremely instrumental in the enhancement of the healthcare processes throughout the organization. In addition, the hospital found that a number of tasks being performed manually could easily be eliminated or automated to reduce costs and increase efficiency. Through discussion with Stoltenberg, St. Luke’s determined that, by outsourcing some of its billing processes, its IT staff could focus on the functionality and maintenance of its information systems and allow the accessibility of the organization’s patients’ financial files to be more readily available.

St. Luke’s first put together a plan of action geared toward the optimization of the medical center’s patient financial services through the implementation of Emdeon ExpressBill Services. The consultants of Stoltenberg, with advice and input from St. Luke’s executives and IT department staff, helped install enhancements to create a more patient-friendly billing process for the hospital and to move toward a more fully–automated billing and collection process.

The hospital’s patient accounting system was further automated by the implementation of CSC PAPERS, a system that automatically posts payments and adjustments submitted via mail for services organization has provided. Stoltenberg consultants aided in the redesign of St. Luke’s statement timelines, which determine what statements are created for each financial class as well as when they are produced.

Before bringing in the expertise of Stoltenberg Consulting, members of St. Luke’s IT department were struggling to make the changes necessary to have a more reliable help desk and keep up with the high volume of queries they were experiencing. The ability of Stoltenberg consultants to provide some creative solutions to the issues and help relieve some unneeded pressure by taking on the problems occurring with the help desk was the answer to many of the queries the St. Luke’s staff was receiving.

Currently the Stoltenberg team is working on wrapping up the implementation of a newly released collection system in Siemens Custom Letters and is expected to begin implementing Soarian Financials at St. Luke’s newly acquired Magic Valley Medical Center (previously Twin Falls Hospital) in March of 2008. The Stoltenberg team looks forward to continuing to provide client product and support for St. Luke’s.