The Challenge

In 2017, multiple independent healthcare facilities in Eastern Pennsylvania merged to become one large regional integrated delivery network (IDN). With more than 230 locations and 2,200 physicians, specialists and providers, the health system serves 2.5 million people.

As often happens with health system mergers and acquisitions, the IDN had a Transition Service Agreement (TSA) in place to allow the facilities to acclimate to their newly acquired assets, infrastructure, and systems for a specific period of time. Because the IDN had selected a go-forward electronic medical record (EMR) for all of its facilities, the terms of the TSA also mandated that five MedHost systems needed to be taken offline by October 1, 2019.

The Solution

The IDN worked with an HIT consultant to put together a plan to work down the active accounts receivables (AR) in these five systems with the help of an outside collection agency. Because DataArk, MediQuant’s active enterprise data archiving platform, offers extensive patient accounting capabilites, the IDN could archive those five MedHost systems and still work down the AR.

MediQuant’s team began building the IDN’s DataArk solution in April 2019, actively coordinating with both the customer and its third-party collection agency to ensure the active archive solution included all the integration points and interfaces required to handle everything the IDN wanted to do, from self-pay activity to insurance agency follow up.

The IDN’s facilities went live with Epic on August 2, 2019. Following the go-live, MediQuant’s team began migrating the legacy data from those five soon-to-be decommissioned MedHost systems to DataArk – moving three year’s worth of account, patient, transaction, coding and balance information created for nearly 2 million distinct patient/medical record numbers.

Then, with the TSA deadline less than 60 days away, the IDN changed the collection agency that would work down the health system’s AR.

The Results

While this type of curveball may have thrown others, as the pioneer of the healthcare data archiving space, MediQuant has worked with hundreds of other HIT organizations since it was founded in 1999. The customer’s new collection agency was among them and MediQuant already had a trusted relationship with the new agency, smoothing the transition. Because of its vendor-neutral approach to integrations, very few changes were needed to what had already been built. This, and leveraging our standardized formatting of the legacy data, kept the project on track.

Rather than a waterfall approach, the MediQuant team took all five legacy MedHost facilities live on DataArk on the same day in September 2019, in advance of the TSA deadline and without any additional MedHost support costs.

With 40 total interfaces supporting various patient accounting integration points – from two-way refund communication and ingesting 835s to lockboxes – the customer was able to work down its more than $500 million in AR.

Eight months later, with a focus on addressing bad debt, the health system once again turned to MediQuant for assistance to support three more agency partnerships with a dozen more interfaces.

“Our extraction capabilites and vendor-neutral interfaces were crucial to our ability to meet this deadline It really illustrated the fact that we have the right people, the right tools and the right processes.”

Shelly Disser

VP of Solution Delivery, MediQuant