Orlando Health is Live on Affinity M15

We are excited to announce that on March 21, 2015 Orlando Health went live on Affinity® M15 and HealthShare 2014! A big thank you to our partners and their teams for the commitment and cooperative spirit displayed in thoroughly testing Affinity M15 to ensure it will be a quality release!

In the Affinity M15 Patient Search window, there’s a new Mother/Baby and Parent/Child link on the new identifying column. Melinda Cunningham, CHTS-IS, CRCR, Patient Accounting Applications Consultant observes, “This is a wonderful new feature that has already received positive responses from our end users. Having the ability to distinguish accounts that have a mom/baby or parent/child series link is a tremendous asset, especially when it comes to identifying Parent recurring accounts that have always been a challenge.”

Ms. Cunningham also commented on the new automation for moving accounts to self-pay when a payment is received and the account balance matches the patient’s responsibility on the 835: “This feature will allow our accounts to move automatically to the patient’s responsibility without manual intervention, allowing our collectors to focus on accounts that need more attention and will save untold hours of manual review.”

Also new in Affinity M15 is a utility to push HL7 A08 messages. “This will reduce the need for scripting edits to produce A08 messages to send to update or add data to our downstream systems, which currently is very time consuming,” says Tricia Alfonso, CRCR, Patient Access Applications Consultant. “Now we can process a file to push a batch of ADT outbound messages in mere seconds.”

Additionally, Affinity M15 contains several automation, workflow and efficiency enhancements:

• Ability to drive workflow from denials and payment/contractual variances independent from your collection activities
  • These enhancements allow you to manage your denials and payment variances by assigning them for follow-up and providing information for your ongoing process improvement initiatives
  • In concert with the denials reporting in QuadraMed Business Intelligence (QBI), this change to support denial workflow and follow-up provides a comprehensive denial management solution
• Rapid Outpatient Admit to get interface messages to your clinical system quickly
• APC Batch Automation
• Delete/Hide Payer, which retains information like EDI 270/271 transactions even though the Payer has been “deleted”
• Introduce a financial assessment tool to aid in charity allowance determination and processing
• Provide new processes for managing organ donation
• Support for Patient Photos

We expect Affinity M15 to be general availability in the second quarter of 2015. Watch out for more information in future client newsletters!