September 12, 2007 - Westchester Medical Center has selected the Canopy care management solution from Allscripts to help manage and coordinate care for its patients.
The 635-bed Medical Center, an academic teaching facility of New York Medical College, is a Level III trauma center that serves more than 3.5 million people in the seven-county Hudson Valley region. Westchester Medical Center houses a leading kidney transplant program in the state and is one of only a handful of liver transplant programs in New York. Its Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital is the only all-specialty children’s hospital in the region. All of the Medical Center's facilities will now utilize Canopy to streamline their care management workflow, manage insurance claims, and to monitor each patient's length of stay and health status from the moment they are admitted to when they are safely discharged.
Canopy streamlines and automates utilization, case, discharge and quality management processes while generating an immediate return on investment by improving length of stay and revenue recovery. A Web-based, Application Service Provider (ASP) solution, Canopy can be installed quickly with minimal IT support. Canopy Connect provides secure online communications with payers, physicians and others, enabling hospitals to quickly communicate care management information such as clinical reviews and post-acute placement requests. The system also enables case management staff to electronically “task” the Medical Center’s Durable Medical Equipment (DME) department, transportation coordinator, and contracted home health care agencies to quickly coordinate the discharge of patients.
“We chose Canopy because I can honestly say it is truly user friendly – it’s easy for our clinical staff to focus on the patient as they manage care across the continuum,” said Joseph A. Borges, M.D., MHA, vice president of clinical care management. “Canopy has improved our everyday life here in every single way, for example by making it simple to pass along tasks and information. Rather than wasting time on voicemail, email or paging someone, we can task that person and the entire patient record goes with the task, which allows us to accomplish more in less time.”
Borges said Canopy has already delivered significant financial returns by reducing average length of stay at the Medical Center by nearly one-third of a day.
“That may not sound like much but when you multiply it by tens of thousands patients each year, it represents a significant reduction in costs, and we expect length of stay to keep falling,” he said.
The Medical Center will interface Canopy with its other information systems to provide a real-time feed of the essential patient information needed for the care management process.
For more information: www.allscripts.com