HealthPort's® Leading ROI Partner Program Selected by Florida Hospital Across Eight Locations

Alpharetta, GA, January 12, 2010: HealthPort, a top-25 company in the healthcare information technology industry, today announced that Florida Hospital, a 2,188 bed hospital system with eight locations across Central Florida, has begun deployment of their release of information (ROI) technology and service solution alongside the organization's Cerner® Millennium electronic health record (EHR). Using HealthPort's ROI Partner Program, Florida Hospital will outsource all medical record request distribution, invoicing and collections to HealthPort while the organization's internal ROI staff manages up-front functions such as HIPAA privacy and security training, customer service, and document selection. 

"HealthPort's ROI Partner Program has helped us improve customer service: we focus on the front end of the ROI process; create consistent messaging across locations; and ensure the right documents are sent to requestors," mentions Anne Howell, RHIA, Director of ROI, Florida Hospital. "HealthPort does the rest." 

Once the Florida Hospital ROI staff logs requests and identifies the correct documents for release, they are uploaded electronically from Cerner or scanned into HealthPort's online ROI system. HealthPort takes over from there and completes the remaining ROI tasks from their centralized processing center in Alpharetta, Georgia. "Having HealthPort manage record production and mail distribution from their centralized facility is a time savings for us; they can print and ship records much faster than we could do internally," Howell adds. 

Finally, at any time, HIM managers across Florida Hospital can see the status of requests and expected delivery dates using HealthPort's eSmartLogTM and ROI TransmitTM Websites. HealthPort's ROI technology and online tracking tools have really made it a lot easier for us to see the status of ROI processing and respond to requestor inquiries in real-time," concludes Howell. 

"Before selecting HealthPort's Partner Program, we seriously considered bringing the entire ROI function in-house," mentions Margaret Verity, Administrative Director of Health Information Management, Florida Hospital. Verity felt the organization would have better control over the ROI process and could potentially earn some ROI revenue. "Instead we discovered that HealthPort's shared service approach gives us the control we wanted without the back-end burdens of billing, collections and invoicing-tasks that may not be a natural skill set for HIM professionals," concludes Verity. Once fully implemented, Florida Hospital will recognize monthly revenue from the ROI process through the Partner Program and receive money back from HealthPort to compensate for their portion of initial ROI processing. 

"We are excited by this partnership with Florida Hospital," commented Mike Labedz, CEO of HealthPort.  "In particular, we are proud that one of the leading and largest not-for-profit hospitals in the country recognized the unique benefits of HealthPort's proprietary technology and centralized operating model.  We will continue to seek opportunities such as this to further penetrate the in-house ROI market." 

About HealthPort

HealthPort is one of the largest providers of health information solutions serving more than 10,000 healthcare facilities, over 44,000 physicians and millions of requestors nationwide. With the widest selection of affordable, quality health information products and services in the HIT industry, HealthPort is changing the face of healthcare by combining knowledge, technology and service to streamline the administrative and business processes of the healthcare community. For more information, visit www.healthport.com or call 800-737-2585. 

About Florida Hospital

Opened in 1908, Florida Hospital is one of the largest not-for-profit hospitals in the country, caring for more than a million patient visits per year - that's more than any other hospital in the country, according to the American Hospital Association. The more than 2,000-bed system, comprised of eight hospitals and 19 Centra Care locations, has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best hospitals in the country for the past 10 years.