Published in the February 2008 issue of Today’s Hospitalist
WHAT IF YOU COULD CREATE a software system that includes not only charge capture, billing and coding, but checklists to help you meet pay-for-performance requirements, direct paging to connect physicians and nurses, and Web access for referring clinicians and administrators?
Put all those features together and you’d have a package that looks like the I-MED system developed by Advanced InPatient Solutions. That’s because the company’s Web-based software is much more than a practice management tool for hospitalists.
In addition to basic billing functions, the software can analyze the productivity and financial health of hospitalists, either by group or individual physicians. It also automates functions like patient assignment, group scheduling and patient-list posting by hospitalist, which can be a daily grind for doctors.
The company’s latest software started out as the brainchild of hospitalist Krishan Nagda, MD, CEO of Central Florida Inpatient Medicine, which has nearly 40 full- and part-time hospitalists. After founding the group in 2001, Dr. Nagda “who worked as an electrical engineer before medical school “wanted software to facilitate communications.
He began working with programmers to devise “a very simple program” to fax admission notes and discharge summaries to primary care physicians. “At the time, we couldn’t find anything like it off the shelf,” he explains.
In 2006, he co-founded Advanced InPatient Solutions, which took the prototype and enhanced the application to include a full suite of management and communication functions. Dr. Nagda’s hospitalist practice continues to serve as the system’s beta site, collaborating on new and improved options.
While I-MED is being rolled out nationally, Dr. Nagda has no plans to quit practicing. With hospital medicine changing so rapidly, he says, any software has to be continuously updated and customized.
“If you’re not a practicing hospitalist,” he states, “you’re not aware of those changes in real time.”
More information is online at advancedinpatient.com.
