By Jane Ehrhardt
During his 13 years working in the supply chain side of healthcare, Jim Ferch got a clear view of the needless complexity of tracking and billing for items, especially in hospitals. “The biggest pain points we had as clinicians, finance and supply chain managers, and vendor reps was at the end of every implant case,” he says.
Each implant case generally moves through multiple touchpoints starting in the OR through billing in order to document, chart, and approve a single case. This was a major frustration for Ferch.
So about 18 months ago, he launched the Simplify OR platform. During that time, the Specialty Orthopedic Group of Mississippi has successfully documented $10.2 million of implant cases through the Simplify OR platform. “The contract savings in this past year has been about $84,000,” Ferch says. The staff time saved measured at least 1,244 hours for anything from vendor contract compliance and rep communications to the greatest time-saver of 395 hours from not having to search for purchase order (PO) item numbers.
The implant case management platform is tailored for hospitals and surgery centers to ensure vendor contract compliance. It also auto fills in data on all the required forms for billing, tracking, and charting. “Simplify OR addresses the frustrations of redundant and time-consuming paperwork by digitizing the entire implant tracking process,” Ferch says.
Anyone who needs to approve or review aspects of what is normally a cumbersome paper trail, can now view, approve, reject, and input data on their Apple phone via the Simplify OR app or on the web application. Vendor reps can scan in the implant information rather than manually inputting it on sheets of paper, and leaving the paperwork behind.
“There’s no other software out there that can do what my software does,” Ferch says. “And the reason for that is because I built it while I was a supply chain director for a healthcare system and I knew all the pain points.”
Usually, the paper trail travels through 23 touch points between three departments and five people who all have to acknowledge that piece of paper. All of those are a manual workflow carried out every time to ensure the case is billed to the patient correctly, charted to the patient, updates the materials management system, and produces the purchase order at the current contract pricing.
“I’ve developed code to automate all of that on the web app,” Ferch says. “So with Simplify OR, the vendor rep in the OR records the consumption of implanted devices and hardware into the app. Once the circulating nurse approves that list, the app updates all five key data points: charge master, item master, patient chart, patient billing, and the PO file. That’s all the lift that has to be done from that point forward for the hospital to correctly charge that patient and issue a PO based on the current contract pricing to that distributor for those implants.”
When Ferch first created the platform, he did a case study at a hospital. The app uncovered an overpayment of roughly $80 per implant case because they were paying the submitted invoice from the vendor, but that invoice was not necessarily the current contract pricing. They were also underbilling implant cases an average of $240 because if the charge nurses didn’t have the charge number in the charge master file, they would just click on something close.
“That happens every day everywhere,” Ferch says. Automating the entire process meant they captured on average $320 in billable charges. For a hospital that performs maybe 6,000 orthopedic implant procedures a year, that’s a savings of $1.9 million.
The situation spotlighted a major fault with the current paper process, which is driven by vendor reps and their data with no transparency and a lack of accountability. But because the automated platform pulls data from the current contract and device numbers are scanned in at the OR, and case pricing and tracking remain accurate, and based on the agreed-upon terms of the contract, that transparency flows both ways. When OR staff tap “approved” in the app, the vendor rep who added the case data automatically receives a spreadsheet copy of the case consumption.
The combination of manual input, barcode scanning, and automated batch input saves staff time and avoids multiple human-error points, because the software automatically pulls what it requires from the facility’s existing EMRs (patient charts), ERPs (managing resources), and the implant contracts, which get updated through spreadsheet uploads.
“For integrations of Simplify OR to their EMR and ERP, there is no IT lift required from the hospital or surgery center. The platform manages the integrations for them,” Ferch says.
Though orthopedics would seem to dominate the platform’s usefulness, its efficiencies can be applied to any field that utilizes implants, including cardiology, ophthalmology, neurology, plastic surgery, and dental. “It’s a pain for any clinical person to document these cases or to even follow up with patient financial services to get the right information to be able to bill the patient correctly,” Ferch says. “And those are the steps that I’ve automated.”
