Florida's Health First Network Tackles Automation

January 30, 2007 | Health First, a regional network with three major hospitals and an array of outpatient centers in Bervard County, Fla., was a typical regional healthcare provider "drowning in paperwork," says Health First IT operations manager Jose Lanza.

With U.S. healthcare generating more paperwork than any other industry, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) estimates that costs of administrative overhead will grow to as much as $500 billion next year, due to claims-related paperwork, unnecessary or duplicate tasks, improper billing, and member administration. This was the kind of environment that Health First faced.

The progressive Health First system, which includes the county's only trauma center, commercial HMOs, and specialized disease programs, was devoted to quality patient care but had an enormous task at hand: transferring patient-sensitive data to over 15 business units, encompassing over 5,500 employees and over 2,000 partner providers.

"We had a totally manually-based system full of human mistakes," says Lanza. He cites a litany of time-consuming processes: Over 300 daily reports that had to be created and delivered to different departments; the organization's two mainframe databases had to be backed up manually every 24 hours with tape; billing files had to be sent by mail and sometimes took as long as a week to receive; multiple "boxes of paper" were delivered "from point A to point B."

But seven years ago, the Health First IT team envisioned a proactive system that would be completely automated and error-free. They turned to AutoMate, a Windows automation tool also widely used in the financial services industry. "There wasn't a big learning curve," Lanza says of the drag-and-drop task building that requires no code programming or batch file writing. Joe Kosco, vice president of Network Automation, based in Los Angeles, says AutoMate is "intuitive," with built-in triggers for automated job scheduling and event log monitoring; English language display makes IT maintenance easier.

Secure data transfer is paramount at Health First, and the "very open" AutoMate allows for fully automated encryption and FTP transfer. "PGP [what's that? Pretty Good Protection ecryption?] can run inside AutoMate and be a fully integrated system compliant with HIPAA requirements," says Lanza.

Over 75 tasks are currently in production at Health First, with another 10 in development. BMC Software acts as a task documentation database, controlling the remedy and change management processes. "You can develop a million tasks but if you don't document it correctly, you have a nightmare," says Lanza.

But Margaret Mayer, director of marketing of Boston Software Systems' Boston WorkStation, a competing workflow automation scripting tool, says AutoMate is "finicky about what it will work with."

Even Kosco admits "it's not out-of-the box software"-- business processes have to optimized first. "You can't automate something you don't understand," says Kosco.

In the end, though, automation "decreases risk and increases agility, giving instant value" to businesses, says Chris Howard, an application platform analyst with the Burton Group.At Health First, the delivery of critical reports to various hospitals used to be an expensive process that took up three days and required hiring outside couriers. Now this process is done completely electronically.

"I can't give you an exact cost savings," says Lanza. "I can't calculate the savings in manpower, time, and efficiency. I can tell you that we've eliminated reams of paperwork. And one thing I know for sure: We've saved a lot of trees."

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