Practice Innovations
Prior to application of advanced skin products and treatments, a benefit verification (BV) form is completed. Companies provide a paper BV form specific to their company and product. Nurses are generally tasked with completing these forms prior to product application. Information requested includes patient demographics, wound characteristics, ICD-10 codes, insurance information, provider information, and facility information. All of this information lives within the medical record, yet nursing is hand writing duplicate information to complete BV forms. This practice is time consuming and places facilities as risk for manual entry errors.
Methods:
The CNS, EMR build team, and representative from the product company collaborated to create an electronic BV form. The goal was to reduce errors, and decrease nursing time to complete forms. The project took approximately eight months to complete. A form was created in the EMR that populated existing data into a letter that strongly resembled the company's original BV form.. Information pulled included demographics, wound characteristics, and insurance information. When creating the form, nursing selections are from prepopulated lists, no free text. Verbiage from the original form was used to comply with company policy. To further expedite the process, the company fax was added to the EMR. Samples of the form were shared with the product company for approval and to conduct staff training.
The CNS completed in-person training and email education to the nursing staff on how to complete and send the form.
Results: Post implementation survey results show that nursing staff are highly satisifed with the electronic BV process and it has saved time, and they are more likely to submit BV. The company has expressed satisfaction with the process. Risk for errors due to manual entry have been eliminated. It was found that not all nurses were utilizing the same ICD-10 code to complete the paper benefit verification forms, as the provider used in the progress note, creating billing inquiries. This risk has been eliminated. The new form pulles ICD-10 codes from the provider's documentation. Nursing staff have requested that other companies BV forms be converted to electronic.
Discussion: Converting BV forms to electronic versions that pull existing data from EMR are effective in reducing time to complete forms and eliminating risk for transcription errors. An additional benefit was reduction in paper and elimination of scanning documents. The strong collaboration between all parties to improve processes aided in the success of the project.