Editor’s note: Last week, Florence Davis, director of Patient Access at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, a 489-bed pediatric health system, shared some of her successes from 2008. With more than 15 years experience in clinical and healthcare administration, Davis is a leader in developing long- and short-term strategies for seamless patient flow and front-end denial management.

Here are some more success stories from Davis:

• Registration system. We have been very busy with our new registration and scheduling system implementation. The go-live is not until next year, but we have been working with all areas to agree on a "schegistration" process. This is the process where at the time of scheduling, we will also be completing the registration of all appointments.This is a big win in terms of improving patient wait times and therefore improving customer service.
• Centralized admission. We have partnered with the clinical operations to launch a “transfer center.” This new center located off-site from the hospitals is where all admissions are called in and accepted /rejected by the physicians or nurses. As part of this team, patient access obtains the required registration information at time of admission acceptance by the nurses or physicians and performs eligibility and pre-certification of the admission prior to the patient showing up in our facility. We went live with this third quarter of 2008 and hope to see some positive impact in our reimbursement for admissions and transfers.

In 2009, we are looking forward to a successful implementation of EPIC our new scheduling, registration and billing system. Looking forward to a new image for Patient Access through deliberate "re-branding.”