THE CUSTOMER PROFILE
Baptist Health is a faith-based, mission-driven system in Northeast Florida comprised of Baptist Medical Center Jacksonville; Baptist Medical Center Beaches; Baptist Medical Center Nassau; Baptist Medical Center South, and Wolfson Children’s Hospital – the region’s only children’s hospital. All Baptist Health hospitals have achieved Magnet™ status for excellence in patient care.
The health system developed the region’s first primary care network, which now includes more than 172 physicians and 73 advanced practitioners in 56 offices in Northeast Florida. Its MD Anderson Cancer Center provides world-renowned cancer care and is highly involved in healthcare education and training.
Baptist Health has 1,326 beds. It serves more than 61,000 patients annually and has nearly 14,000 team members.
THE CHALLENGE
Evolving a streamlined compliance program requires a standardized approach and an audit platform to scale with the organization.
Chief Compliance Officer Toni Teumer joined Baptist Health in the late fall of 2020 with the task of streamlining and maturing the health system’s compliance program. At that time, the organization had two separate compliance groups – two distinct teams using disparate tools, reporting to different departments. “It was important that we standardize our approach and reduce duplicate work,” says Teumer, who oversees professional and corporate compliance, internal auditing, privacy, and enterprise risk management. She explains that eliminating unnecessary costs was important, but “Our top priority is to create consistent and risk-aware culture across the health system.”
The compliance industry and our program at Baptist shifted our focus from identifying errors and eliminating “no” from our terminology says Teumer. “Today, forward-thinking health systems see compliance as a business accelerator. We want to focus on the front end— on avoiding mistakes and errors,” she explains.
That was a tall order, given that one compliance team audited about 400 providers using MDaudit while another team used a different tool for a separate group of over 500 primary care providers. “To be truly effective, we need to identify particular providers or positions significantly different in their billing patterns from their peers,” says Teumer. “We should identify specific risks as they emerge, quickly allocate teams to conduct focused audits, and mitigate them.”
A key part of the one-stop shop initiative had a single team and system for storing audits, risk metric cards, and educational materials. Teumer says she wanted to be able to look at a particular provider or audit project and see every associated document, even if it was generated outside of the audit software. Having both teams reporting to her and using the same platform was essential to Teumer’s goal of a streamlined approach to compliance and auditing for the health system.
Forward-thinking health systems see compliance as a business accelerator. We want to focus on the front end—on avoiding mistakes and errors.
We consider MDaudit to be an extension of our team. They’ve been more than available and understand our asks.
THE SOLUTION
The ambitious optimization project resulted in greater productivity, high-value reporting, an agility boost, and a true one-stop compliance shop.
In the summer 2022, Teumer and her team successfully completed an optimization project to bring auditing for all 500 primary care providers onto the MDaudit platform and merge the audit teams. Teumer says it was essential to complete the project before Epic came online that fall to make the department ready for full integration. Teumer credits the MDaudit team for delivering on their promise of a June 1 go-live.
“The efficiencies from the standardized audit approach have been tremendous,” says Teumer, allowing smooth workflow throughout the department and higher productivity. “I’m pleased with how far we’ve come. We went from completing 20 audits to 63 in the same time period,” she says, adding that MDaudit could scale up to include a much larger number of providers without issue. With the document management module, she can easily achieve her goal of having all relevant documents in a single, easy-to-access repository.
Importantly, Teumer’s team uses MDaudit to easily compare data across the organization and deliver high-value reports to key stakeholders, from physicians to the executive team. “Now that we’re consistently providing value-add service and support to our providers, they’re recognizing that we’re an asset to the health system,” she says. “We can also report much more effectively to our compliance committees, leadership teams, and executive committees—because all of our data is in one place.”
Teumer notes that her department is considerably more agile, able to tap into MDaudit’s expertise on potential risks. “Compliance is not a static field,” she says, “every day something is changing, whether it is our patient mix, regulations, or unforeseen events like the pandemic.” As a result, she believes MDaudit was the right choice for auditing and monitoring platforms for Baptist. “The team helping to monitor risks, continually build new tools, and provide updated guidance is an enormous value-add. We consider MDaudit to be an extension of our team. They’ve been more than available and understand our asks,” she says.
The one-stop shop Teumer has aimed for since she began at Baptist Health is now a reality, as it is becoming a business accelerator. “We’re now able to play an advisory role, making sure everyone understands that we need to take a particular regulation or code change into consideration as we’re building out a new process or procedure,” she says.
“We’ve gained a seat at the executive leadership table, where any compliance program strives to be. We are at the table as the trusted colleague and partner on the front end rather than the cleanup crew on the back end,” says Teumer. “MDaudit helps us do that with data to identify risks early on and quickly.”
As we advance, Teumer plans to go even deeper into the data and analytics portion of MDaudit, which provides end-to-end analytics that drives revenue outcomes. “There is so much more we want to do. The first phase was getting the audit team up and running and collecting data in a consistent way. And now, having comparative data for all the other MDaudit users is extraordinarily valuable. We plan to use the tool to develop and deliver much more sophisticated audits and use the metric cards to identify risks so that we can focus our program on emerging trends,” she says. “That’s the key next step.”
THE RESULTS
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