Suburban Heights' comprehensive on-site facilities include a pharmacy, a surgicare-center, an occupational medicine department, an eye care center, a laboratory and an x-ray facility.
Because of the physical size of the Medical Center and the diverse services they provide, Suburban needed a flexible information system capable of supporting large data volumes with continued growth. Suburban was also turning toward a managed care environment and they needed a system to administrate their managed care contracts effectively. Finally, their breadth of services and various on-site facilities demanded a more efficient solution for inter-departmental communications. In December 1991, Suburban Heights selected QSI as their practice management system vendor.
Currently, their QSI System supports over 200 workstations, eight high-volume printers, and 46 low-volume printers. Suburban Heights utilizes the system to perform centralized and de-centralized billing, collections, patient registration, and appointment scheduling. They process approximately 400,000 patient visits and 200,000 statements per year, and they maintain records for approximately 100,000 patients on their IBM RS/6000™ Model 580H.
The QSI System provides for fully-integrated managed care capability, allowing Suburban Heights to maintain an organization that is 30% capitated as a whole. In addition, the managed care department oversees two separate risk pools and allows for 100% capitation for their entire staff of specialists.
The QSI System has also improved the Center's communications with e-mail capability as well as on-line lab results from a SmithKline lab system and on-line radiology transcription utilizing QSI's Summary Medical Records package. According to Dale Burkhardt, Assistant Administrator, Ancillary Services, "The QSI Summary Medical Records have made a tremendous difference for our group. We're a multi-specialty practice with several locations. Before the QSI Summary Medical Records, we spent the majority of our time chasing charts and files. Now, we can access and maintain the record electronically from all of our sites. It is an enormous time saver."
Burkhardt further added, "Over the years, Suburban has evaluated other types of 'data capture/transcription' systems, only to find that QSI's integrated Summary Medical Record functionality is still better than any of the free-standing or add-on products on the market."
Suburban Heights has been ranked in the top 15-20% of large group practices participating in the national Medical Group Management Association's (MGMA) Professional Efficiency Evaluation Report, or PEER program. PEER is a comprehensive analysis of the overall productivity of a given practice, measured against other practices in the program of equal size and complexity.
The QSI System has helped Suburban not only automate the process of maintaining patient medical records, but has also contributed to greater practice efficiencies and improved communications.
This has enabled Suburban Heights Medical Center to focus on delivering
the highest quality medical care to the southern Chicago community.