SRS

Cardiac Specialists Saves Over $1.5 Million and Increases Revenue by $1 Million in First 7 Years with SRS EHR

Challenge How to reap the benefits of a digital office while allowing physicians to conduct exams as they were accustomed and increase, rather than decrease productivity. Solution The SRS Electronic Health Record (EHR) quickly eliminates paper charts, makes physicians more efficient, provides extensive functionality, and generates workflow efficiencies—and improves the bottom line. Results $1,390,000 in cost savings in the first seven years with the reduction of 7.5 full-time support positions, the reassignment of chart room space, and the elimination of costly chart supplies: $850,000 – reduction of 5 FTEs in Medical Records $520,000 – 2.5 fewer additional staff can accommodate 50% practice growth $20,000 – savings in chart supplies Increased patient satisfaction Better patient care Increased patient volume generates $1,000,000 in incremental revenue Decreased physician work hours, while seeing more patients Additional efficiencies and revenues recently generated through:  $100,000 – annual additional Medicare revenue through ePrescribing Reduced transcription costs – due to the use of Dragon

“It’s an affordable, easy-to-use solution that works well for our practice and increases physician and staff productivity. The ROI — more than $2.5 million over seven years— speaks for itself.”
– Robert Hendler, Administrator

Before SRS, we endured the usual struggle to access medical records where and when they were needed and to increase our productivity. Our inefficient office processes were symptoms of our practice’s aging infrastructure, and SRS’s EHR solution delivered the cure. With a moderate investment in SRS, we solved our medical records challenges, and more importantly, our physicians appreciated the ease of implementation and minimal training required. It was a sound, fiscally prudent decision that easily paid for itself. Most importantly, since we’ve adopted SRS, our physicians are more productive, the practice operates more efficiently, and we see more patients, providing them even better service than before.

Ease-of-use was a key factor in our purchasing decision because we knew several colleagues who had purchased expensive, complicated EHR systems that were ultimately too time-consuming to learn or use effectively. We were well aware of the 50% failure rate associated with traditional EHRs, and were not about to take that risk.*

With SRS EHR, we realized significant cost savings almost immediately. Since our office runs more smoothly with SRS, we were ultimately able to reduce our payroll by 7.5 full-time employees. By the end of the first year, we reduced our medical records staff by 3 FTEs, and two years later were down to 5 fewer FTEs in that department, which has saved us approximately $850,000 over the last seven years. Despite having experienced tremendous practice growth since implementing SRS EHR—expanding from 10 to 15 cardiologists and experiencing an even greater increase in patient volume—we have not had to add any billing staff. We also have added 2 fewer medical assistants than we would have needed without SRS. In the last four years, we have saved another $520,000 in these areas. In addition to reducing our staffing costs, eliminating the need for chart supplies generates an additional $3,000 per year in savings. All of these savings will continue to accrue in the future.

Recently, we opened a new office, which was accomplished uneventfully and at lower costs than we would have incurred had we had to move patient charts. Our physicians were ready to see patients the first day.

Our biggest surprise was the positive impact on physicians’ time and consequently productivity. In addition to being able to more efficiently review patient charts with SRS, our physicians are able to stay current with their messages at home, hospital, or office. They can access charts immediately from anywhere, so callbacks to patients and referring physicians are quick and accurate—with full documentation readily available.

Some of our physicians have been able to reduce time spent at the office after-hours because SRS enables to them respond to patient issues during hospital downtime or from home. Callbacks are now generally made on the same day, not a day or two later. This is a key benefit that we believe also directly improves patient care. In addition, this flexibility allows them to make more productive use of their time in the office—freeing them up to see more patients. We conservatively estimate that each of our physicians sees an additional 1 to 2 patients each day that they hold office hours, which has increased our practice-wide revenue by over $1,000,000 over the last seven years.

Our physicians also save a great deal of time using SRS to ePrescribe—and will generate over $100,000 per year in additional Medicare revenue by doing so. They can generate new prescriptions and refills efficiently, and the system automatically records the information in the patient’s chart. We're big fans of ePrescribing—it’s a huge time saver. Recently, several of our physicians began using Dragon to facilitate documentation of visits. Dragon integrates easily with SRS and it’s really easy to learn and use. This is already significantly reducing our transcription costs.

The SRS EHR has significantly improved our efficiency practice-wide—and enables us to be more responsive to our patients. We use the “message pooling” capability to distribute the workload among our staff and make maximum use of their time. We have trained several of our technicians to process physician messages regarding patient problems/issues, to minimize their downtime, which makes everything run more efficiently. This is necessary in current times when money is tighter than ever.

We’re always finding new ways to benefit from our SRS EHR. With SRS, we mine data from our practice management system to identify patients who are overdue for visits. This not only fills in our schedule with additional visits and generates increased revenue, but it also improves patient care.

All of these benefits are the result of having a digital office, with universal access to complete and accurate patient charts. Our cardiologists receive many routine patient calls daily with a variety of questions regarding medications, symptoms, and treatments. One of the most valuable aspects of installing the SRS EHR has been its capability to link the patient’s chart to messages that can be sent directly to the appropriate physician’s desktop computer in real time. With the 24/7/365 access to patient charts that SRS provides, our physicians are providing better care, faster, more accurately, with greater ease at lower cost. Everybody wins.

*Milbank Quarterly Report: Greenhalgh, Trisha, et.al. “Tensions and Paradoxes in Electronic Patient Record Research: A Systematic Literature Review Using the Meta-narrative Method,” http://www.milbank.org/quarterly/8704feat.html.

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