“Navigating the complexities of payer rules and staying on top of the latest changes in reimbursement policies is extremely challenging in today’s trillion dollar healthcare industry,” said George Langdon, General Manager, eCommerce, GE Healthcare IT. “Centricity EDI Services helps our customers focus on providing excellent patient care, instead of spending their time analyzing rejected claims. With the new release, we expect practices to benefit from greater automation of the claims and remittance process, and reports that provide sophisticated insight into revenue cycle issues and trends.”
Centricity EDI Services brings together central financial management tools with the GE Healthcare all-payer claims gateway to give physician offices greater control of the revenue cycle. Currently, over 700 Centricity Practice and Centricity Business customers utilize Centricity EDI Services. In 2008, on average, GE’s claims gateway processed over 14 million claims with a monthly average claim value of almost $4.3 billion. New reports in Centricity EDI Services version 5.2 include “warning reports” which indicate charges that are currently being processed and paid without problems, but which may be affected by pending changes to payer rules. To provide this report, GE Healthcare reaches out to payers to understand changes that could affect customer payments, allowing the customer to focus on any steps they might need to take to prepare for the new rules before they come into effect.
Washington University Physicians, the third largest clinical practice in the U.S., has already started to benefit from new features in version 5.2. “One of the things we appreciate the most about GE’s EDI Services is the proactive monitoring, which helped increase the number of clean claims we sent out the door,” said Connie Belcher, Claims Manager, Washington University Physicians.
“With the new version, GE has taken this idea a step further. In addition to the GE experts who monitor the progress of our claim submission files and manage any discrepancies with our numerous payers, we can pull up the new Rejection Trending report for an at-a-glance view of the errors that can contribute to claims rejection issues for our practices. This helps us understand the source of these problems so we can address them up front, and also allows us to track the effectiveness of process changes.”
“GE’s expertise and experience in the ‘claims to cash’ process, combined with its solid practice management solutions, have made us very satisfied EDI Services customers,” stated Janine Job, Account Manager, HealthSystems. “As a GE value-added reseller, our practices utilize EDI Services to monitor performance, and the new tools and reports in version 5.2 help us provide even better service. The innovations GE has introduced will help us increase efficiency and let our physician practice customers stay focused on the business of caring for patients.”
Centricity EDI Services is a completely web-based solution, so there is no upgrade or service pack installation process for current customers. The new version was made available in the fourth quarter of 2008, and is already in use at 100% of customer sites.
About GE Healthcare
GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest.
GE Healthcare's broad range of products and services enable healthcare providers to better diagnose and treat cancer, heart disease, neurological diseases and other conditions earlier. Our vision for the future is to enable a new "early health" model of care focused on earlier diagnosis, pre-symptomatic disease detection and disease prevention. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company (NYSE: GE). Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries. For more information about GE Healthcare, visit our website at www.gehealthcare.com
