Riordan Information System Business Requirements
Over the last decade Riordan has expanded from a single hospital and pair of clinics to a health network that includes more than a dozen hospitals, as many small clinics and four pharmacies. Riordan’s impressive growth has resulted from a combination of new expansion, partnerships and buyouts and driven the company to become the dominant health care provider in the region. Unfortunately, this rapid growth has led to a situation in which different network facilities have different SOPs governing patient care, record keeping, billing and human resources and has begun to affect the bottom line of the company as it attempts to consolidate the disparate practices into a cohesive whole.
With the advent of the Affordable Care Act, Riordan found it needed ensure that all of its facilities were operating under a common set of policies and guidelines in order to help ease the regulatory requirements the ACA brought with it. Under the current system, each hospital or clinic operates effectively as a discrete business unit. Tracking a given patient’s treatments, insurance benefits, medications and more is expensive and open to mistakes that could leave the company vulnerable to legal actions either by the patient or the government.
In addition, trying to analyze potential problem areas with such a diverse set of data silos spread across so many different facilities was proving to be impossible. With different reporting standards in use at each discreet facility, the process of compiling data across the network requires a significant amount of manual work to convert the data into a consistent format suitable for study and able to generate reports that were useful to upper management. The time needed to do this often meant that the data was too old when it finally reached the hands of the people who required it to make informed