Derby firm saves medical group 60 hours a month
Oberoi Consulting, based in Pride Park, Derby has been commissioned by two healthcare organisations to speed up their billing systems.
The Westcliffe Group, which runs a group of GP practices in Bradford, and Westcliffe Health Innovations, providers of diagnostics and outpatient services, contacted Oberoi Consulting after they identified a need for a simplified and faster billing system after a staff member responsible for billing hospitals and clinical commissioning groups was absent long-term.
Oberoi Consulting’s service development manager Steven McClary says he worked with the Westcliffe team to fully understand the billing procedures, before devising a new system.
The group are users of SystmOne – a clinical database system that enables health and care organisations to deliver integrated patient care. It was here that McClary saw the potential to dramatically reduce the time it took to complete the monthly billing process.
He found the existing data submissions and manual billing process was labour-intensive and very time-consuming and one member of staff spent a great deal of time capturing accurate data in the required format.
He and the team at Oberoi Consulting developed an automated system which could extract the relevant data, in the required format, and export it from Excel directly into an invoice template, saving the Wescliffe Group approximately 60 man hours per month.
Julie Winterbottom, managing partner, Westcliffe Group, told TheBusinessDesk.com: “Oberoi Consulting has been great at interrogating SystmOne and ensuring the correct and relevant data is captured at point of entry.
“Equally, we found their insight into how we can make sure the end data is extracted in the way we need it invaluable – this really goes a long way to help us better manage the short and long-term health of our patients.”
The new system implemented by Oberoi Consulting extracts data, cleans it, and exports it into an invoice template.
Winterbottom described it as a “far simpler and quicker process”. She said: “It has reduced the reliance on one member of staff to carry out the previously onerous task. Each of our service specialities has a clinical co-ordinator who is now in charge of the full process for their own patients from booking procedures to billing, thus improving efficiencies for all involved.”
Mcclary said “We took the time to fully get to grips with the data and to understand what end result was required. There is no software involved; it’s all done in Excel, but now the spreadsheets have been programmed to automatically make the complex calculations and generate the relevant invoice exactly as required by the hospital or Clinical Commissioning Group.
“Not only has this saved approximately 60 staffing hours per month, but it has also negated any room for error or omissions, meaning the group is making sure it gets paid the correct amount for the exact services it has provided.”
