Professional Management Group (PMG) is a Salt Lake City-based provider of revenue cycle management and practice management services for over 650 anesthesiologists. The company prides itself on providing revenue cycle expertise to fully assure its clients that claims will be reimbursed accurately and on time. PMG has extended that expertise even further through its successful implementation of Monarch Data Pump for programming-free healthcare business intelligence. Monarch Data Pump has yielded remarkable business benefits for PMG, including a highly effective receivables scorecarding system as well as reducing PMG's own operational costs.

"We host the MSI healthcare practice management software system for our anesthesiology clients," explains Trent Richardson, Director of EDI and Information Management for PMG. "The MSI system provides ample reports for operations and receivables, but there is no effective way to directly access the data to enable customized reporting."

"At one point, we were running existing reports multiple times in an attempt to provide different levels of detail for our clients. For example, we used to run certain accounts receivable reports three times: once to show summarized results, another run sorted by insurer/payer, and a third report sorted by the service provider. This process took up significant time and resources, and still did not provide actionable data to enable improved revenue cycle management."

In an internal effort to get at the data buried within existing reports, "we tried manually parsing the data out of MSI reports on our own," says Trent. "This included manually deleting report header lines and deriving some complicated formulas to coax the data out of certain reports. Needless to say, this process was very time consuming; for certain complex reports it simply was not possible to get at the data. Fortunately, we soon discovered that there was a very simple yet powerful report mining software application already on the market: Monarch!"

Trent discovered Monarch, report mining software for the desktop by Datawatch in 2004 with immediate results. "Monarch unlocked the data buried within MSI's library of existing reports quickly and easily," Trent says. "Even better, no modifications of any kind to our MSI system were necessary, as Monarch simply leverages existing report output (print files) as a live data source."

As encouraging as Monarch's desktop report mining capabilities were for PMG, the company needed to bring the power of Monarch report mining to an enterprise level. "We wanted to fully automate the process of Monarch report mining companywide, to directly facilitate PMG's workflows essential for improved revenue cycle management for our clients," says Trent. "We selected Monarch Data Pump to fulfill this need."

Residing on a Windows server, Monarch Data Pump provides automated report mining, data customization and delivery throughout the entire organization. "We now have the automated healthcare business intelligence we have been looking for, with no new database programming," Trent says.

"Monarch Data Pump fulfills our reporting and business intelligence needs in four major areas," says Trent. "Our month-end and weekly operational reporting to our clients is now fully automated in the form of customized Excel spreadsheets. We have begun using Monarch Data Pump to provide automated payroll data reporting to our clients as well."

"Monarch Data Pump also has enabled very timely receivables management for our clients. Monarch Data Pump will mine data from our EDI insurance claim submission reports, identifying rejected claims requiring immediate action, as well as retaining a separate SQL database of rejected claims. Our staff members also each receive via automated email Excel files showing filtered and summarized data, by account, by aging which also require further action. Finally, Monarch Data Pump produces Excel files listing accounts which require collection directly from patients, for automatic email delivery to a separate PMG business providing insurance claims follow up services."

"The fourth and most exciting area of our business Monarch Data Pump has enabled is our receivables scorecarding initiative," says Trent. "We have set Monarch Data Pump to automatically mine data from various MSI reports and other claims-related text files, and store this combined historical data in an MS Access database.

"Monarch Data Pump then mines data from current MSI receivables reports, along with lookups to the historical database, to compare current receivables trends with past performance. The result is a set of Excel-based scorecards which measure PMG's revenue cycle management performance for each client over time, by each internal PMG collection team, by each individual."

Trent's pilot Monarch Data Pump scorecarding project with a major PMG client yielded compelling results. "After implementing our scorecards using Monarch Data Pump," says Trent, "Our average Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) for this client went from 56 days to 42 days. Receivables aged over 120 days, which once comprised about 20% of all receivables for this client, fell to less than 10%."

"Without Monarch Data Pump, there is no way we would have been able to produce the customized scorecard data necessary in a timely, accurate manner. What would have been a two week information gathering process is now fully automated thanks to Monarch Data Pump."

Trent estimates Monarch Data Pump continues to save PMG $3,500 per month in reduced costs and productivity efficiencies. "Monarch Data Pump easily paid for itself within a couple of months," says Trent, "while also providing PMG with an ongoing competitive advantage in serving our clients.

Trent shared PMG's impressive scorecarding results at the 2007 Datawatch User Conference presentation in Orlando, Florida. "When performance is measured, reported, aligned with corporate mission, vision and goals, linked with individual compensation, then individual, team, and company performance will surpass all expectations," Trent told conference attendees. "Monarch Data Pump made these performance improvements possible."

Monarch Data Pump Provides Painless Healthcare Business Intelligence for Professional Management Group (PDF)