"We are still just scratching the surface of what is possible with Monarch... Our copies of Monarch have already paid for themselves several times over."

 

Kewanee Hospital uses Monarch report mining to proactively manage collections, billing, accounting, budgeting, HR/payroll functions and more.

Kewanee Hospital is a Critical Access Hospital, serving West Central Illinois since 1919. Kewanee Hospital is a small rural hospital, yet the organization works with data with the ease and confidence many larger healthcare institutions would envy. Kewanee uses Monarch to easily transform numerous healthcare collections, finance, human resources and payroll reports into actionable business intelligence.

Joe Berry is Executive Director of Business for Kewanee Hospital, responsible for all business office functions, admitting and health information management. "I have used Monarch for many years," says Joe. "I encouraged the use of Monarch when I joined Kewanee Hospital in 2003. My colleagues have discovered first hand how fast and efficient working with healthcare data can be using Monarch."

Monarch's leadership in report mining is routinely used to proactively manage the collections, accounting and budgeting functions. "We use Monarch for weekly in-depth analysis of our accounts receivable," says Joe. "The data we need is spread across different existing reports provided by our healthcare information system. Monarch Pro mines and combines the data needed from these reports to help us produce the combined data sets we need."

"I create about twenty different summary receivable data views using Monarch Pro, including detailed receivables by patient type, financial class, aging category and much more. Additionally, Monarch helps me define a baseline weighted average to better manage our receivables."

"I have used Monarch to develop similar analysis for unbilled accounts, cash, adjustments, and bad debt," Joe adds. "Monarch even helped us create a document for our cashiers to use to simplify and strengthen the accuracy of posting Medicare payments from the weekly Medicare voucher."

"Monarch also helps us effectively manage and report our Medicare-related revenue as well," says Laura Hulslander, Accountant. "I use Monarch to mine data from existing reports to produce a Medicare cost report, by department, by payer. "

"Previously, this project took over a day to complete, and often required printing out highly confidential data in addition to manual data entry into Excel. Instead, we use Monarch Pro to mine the data from our reports and export final data to Excel. The entire project is completed in 20 minutes!"

"Monarch is also actively used to make many critical reporting tasks such as budget versus actual reporting quick and easy, with no programming and no manual data entry. We are even starting to use Monarch as an aid in the budgeting process."

Monarch saves substantial time and effort in Kewanee Hospital's human resources and payroll function. "We are just starting to use Monarch for HR projects, and already we are saving over eight hours of work per month," says Renee Salisbury, Executive Director of Human Resources. "We must carefully calculate the correct employer match for each employee for our pension contribution program. The needed data exists on two different reports. Prior to Monarch, we had to manually enter the data into an Excel file and perform certain conditional calculations to derive the correct amounts. "

"Instead, Monarch Pro mines and combines the data from our existing reports, complete with some calculated fields, meaning no more manual work in Excel. The first time I went through this Monarch project with Joe's help, I blinked, and Monarch finished the job! Our copies of Monarch have already paid for themselves several times over."

Monarch even helps Kewanee Hospital with data conversions to meet the demands of outside vendors. "We use a web-based system to analyze our charge master for accuracy," says Laura Soleta, Health Information Coordinator. "Our charge master does not always maintain the data in the same format required by our web-based system. Fortunately, we use Monarch Pro to transform, for example, our internal two-digit charge summary codes into the correct four-digit UB-04 revenue codes expected by our web-based analysis system. It's easy!"

"We also use Monarch to furnish data to outside billing companies for our pathology and radiology billing groups," adds Joe. "I used Monarch to mine data from our standard reports to produce and export customized data meeting the the specifications required by our outside billing firms. Monarch makes it easy to provide healthcare data to outside vendors with full confidence."

Kewanee Hospital is already taking full advantage of the power of Monarch Pro. "I am especially impressed with Monarch's User Defined Functions," says Joe. "For example, there are certain formulas that are needed in order for dates appearing on our reports to be displayed in the Monarch table as date fields. Everyone working with Monarch with our reports has this same problem. Using Monarch, I created a User Defined Function (UDF), and saved the UDF in a Monarch model that can be used by anyone, anywhere. It's perfect!"

Kewanee Hospital also uses Monarch Pro to mine data from reports produced by the organization's Unix-based healthcare information system, as well as mining data directly from system databases. "Monarch Pro is an excellent tool to directly access data stored in databases, as well as for report mining," says Joe. "We can access certain databases within our healthcare information system, so we use Monarch Pro's OLE DB/ODBC database connectivity to access data from our charges file, containing millions of records. Monarch Pro offers many new database filter options, making ad hoc database queries a snap."

"We have already reaped plenty of time savings, improved management of receivables and much more with Monarch," says Joe, "and yet, we are still just scratching the surface of what is possible with Monarch. Monarch is inexpensive and simple to use, yet it provides the same business intelligence other much more expensive and complex solutions would also strive to provide."

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