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Consulting Services

Optimizing Your Cardiovascular Care Delivery System

We work in your world every day—we know your challenges. And we know how to guide you through them. With MedAxiom Consulting, your program begins to transform the moment we walk through your doors. We provide custom and proven solutions based on current trends, proprietary industry data, exclusive tools and hundreds of years of hands-on cardiovascular care delivery improvement experience. The following provides an overview of the services we offer.

Strategy

Strategic Planning

Strategy drives organizational change and growth. Indeed, the lack of a strategic plan and the governance to implement it is one of the most significant hurdles cardiovascular healthcare systems face today. The organizations with clarity of direction and strategy will have the greatest chance of thriving in the communities they serve. Utilizing data assembly and analysis, assessment tools and our 200+ years of CVSL consulting experience, we will help you develop implementation-savvy plans for your sustainability and success.

Core Purpose and Vision Finding
Business and Market Development Planning
Patient and Stakeholder Engagement
Population Health

Cardiovascular Service Line Development

A well-designed cardiovascular service line brings together the talents of the integrated organization to create value for the patient by optimizing the performance of a unified entity. Our expertise includes developing the foundation for your CVSL, defining reporting accountability and performance metrics, designing financial and quality reporting, dashboard development and assessing culture improvement needs

Assessment, Development and Optimization
Governance and Infrastructure
Hospital-Physician Alignment
Physician and Dyad Leadership Development
Comanagement and Financial Model
Performance Monitoring

Provider Resource Management

In a value-based world, recruiting and retaining the best talent is critical to achieving the highest quality outcomes. As market competition increases and volume and reimbursement decrease, provider workforce compensation and management becomes more important and complex. Our approach is cardiology specific and creates plans that are internally equitable, externally competitive, sustainable, transparent, easy to understand and commercially viable.

Compensation Plans and Redesign
Workforce Assessment and Planning
Care Team Development
Physician Engagement and Culture
Physician Deployment and Productivity Model
Comanagement Arrangements

MedAxiom brought a national perspective that really helped challenge our group on how to develop a model that positions us to be successful in the long term.

– Pat Ganyo,
Bryan Heart

Operations

The ability to function at peak efficiency is a requirement for healthcare organizations today. We specialize in identifying process and workforce inefficiency and developing roadmaps for redesign and optimization. Our formal training in the Lean and Six Sigma Performance Improvement methodologies combined with in-depth experience in innovative cardiovascular practices and service lines and access to exclusive and leading industry data allows us to efficiently guide your organization to best practice.

Operational Improvement / Core Competency Development
Our operational improvement work increases the efficiency of CV organizations—eliminating wasteful process, optimizing resource utilization and throughput—to provide a quality and highly patient satisfying experience.
Operational Benchmarking and Assessment
We provide organizations the ability to benchmark performance to the proprietary MedAxiom MedAxcess database along with an assessment for operational efficiency.
Cath, EP Lab, Device Clinic and Diagnostic Testing Center Optimization
Our focus is on gaining throughput, equipment utilization and staff ratio optimization. Based on our data collection and on-site observations, we then provide tools, process maps, prioritized task, standardized work definitions and staffing ratios to assist in optimization plan implementation.
EMR Prep and Improvement
We help prepare an organization operationally to launch an EMR or Go-Live on a new EMR. All processes should be optimized prior to launching a new EMR and workflows should be complemented by the EMR, rather than the EMR dictating operational workflows.

Lori knows practice operations. She knows things to make practices better and does a great job of pushing you in directions you may not necessarily want to go, but need to go. We are very happy with the MedAxiom Consultants.

– DR. GEOFFREY COLE,
ATHENS REGIONAL PHYSICIAN GROUP

Clinical

Transforming clinical services into programs that manage entire populations of patients to consistent standards of care is essential today. We help you develop systems of care that meet your patients’ needs—including heart failure, atrial fibrillation, ischemic heart disease, prevention and peripheral vascular disease—where they are.

Clinical strategies include team-based care approaches to support comprehensive clinical programming that will enhance throughput, improve quality and outcomes and improve patient satisfaction. We focus on access, disease-specific management, and a holistic approach to patient care.

Center of Excellence Program Development
Successful population-based strategies being deployed in programs today include re-envisioning the concepts of centers of excellence. With our help, programs can start their population health journey by embracing subspecialization and creating “centers of excellence” sites focused on specific disease states. Physicians who have expertise in treating a certain patient population are empowered to determine the appropriate care standards using evidence-based medicine and interdisciplinary consensus, which is disseminated throughout the system.
Clinical Program Design and Development
We help clients create clinically integrated networks of providers who, by agreement, coordinate and collaborate in the provision of care based on consistent guidelines, pathways, protocols, and desired outcomes. In addition to more purposeful integration between cardiology subspecialists, clinical integration efforts are effectively focused between cardiology and primary care physicians, cardiologists and hospitalists, and cardiologists and emergency department physicians.
Population Health and Patient Access Strategy
Here we focus on the development of a strategy around population management that is disease based to include appropriate identification, team-based care approaches, quality outcomes and measures.
Multidisciplinary Clinic Development
This allows us to concentrate on chronic disease populations, including those with heart failure and A fib, as well as high technical multidisciplinary procedures such as TAVR and structural heart.
Care Team, Care Transition and Care Coordination Optimization
We see more and more that care teams provide value by reducing costs, increasing access to care, and utilizing physicians focused on diagnosis, treatment, and care determination for patients. Development of a care team approach allows your program to go from one physician taking care of a panel of patients to an entire group taking care of a community. Working to top of license with clear roles and responsibilities based on your patient’s needs is the objective. This includes utilization of Advanced Practice Provider, Scribes, Nurses and ancillary staff to drive throughput, growth, and quality.

Finance

The bottom line is a top priority in value-based medicine. With increasingly complex payor billing requirements and declining reimbursement, organizations must cut cycle times and reduce errors to remain sustainable. We look at the big picture, providing complete assessment and benchmarking of your financial health. This guides us in identifying areas for improvement and ways to recover lost revenue.

Service Line, Department and Practice Optimization Plans
Today healthcare systems have to plan carefully and specifically for financial success. From developing vision and direction to analyzing options and creating action plans, we have the experience and expertise to help the independent practice, service line and hospital optimize their financial performance.
CVSL Coding and Compliance Audits and Education
Coding and documentation guidelines are complex and often overlooked by physicians and billing staff. Avoid risk, penalties or the possibility of losing reimbursement through our support in evaluating, developing and implementing your compliance plan. Educating physicians and non-physician practitioners and staff will improve the quality of patients’ medical records and allow coders to optimize the revenue potential of each patient care service provided.
Revenue Cycle Improvement Planning
Through an extensive review of your documentation, our revenue cycle audits help you identify risk, areas for improvement, verify that your coding and documentation is accurate and meets all regulatory requirements. We will assist your staff with developing an action plan to address problem areas and educate your staff to meet your goals.
RAC Audit Preparation/Liability Mitigation
Of the current issues Recovery Audit Contractos (RACs) are publishing, the most common themes center around duplicate charges and services billed during global periods. Our specialists provide you with an improved understanding of coding/documentation guidelines to increase compliance and reduce liability/risk.
Provider-Based Billing
Impacting physician practices that have been integrated into a hospital system, this type of billing is used when services are provided in an outpatient hospital department or location. Understanding its complexity and specificity is essential. We provide improved understanding of coding/documentation requirements as well as coding/documentation audit and education for both providers and staff.
ICD-10 Training and Support
Cardiology-specific training by our certified AHIMA ICD-10-CM trainers for coders, billers and providers in the documentation requirements.

Nicole and her team did a very in-depth analysis of our business office processes and gave us a lot of great recommendations that I still refer to today.

– Rebecca Beto,
Cardiology Associates of Corpus Christ