How Working 'Hand-in-Hand' Made for Seamless Tech Implementation

The president of St. Johns Radiology Associates talks about its middle revenue cycle tech implementation process.

Implementing new technology to reduce administrative burdens and increase bottom lines is commonplace in the revenue cycle, but getting there isn’t always an easy road.

Between administrative buy-in and complicated go-lives, there always tends to be hiccups from conception to implementation. But this is where St Johns said its experience differed.

Just like other healthcare organizations, St. Johns needed to streamline revenue cycle processes. The group decided to do this by implementing an advanced speech reporting solution with built-in computer-assisted physician documentation functionality for its middle revenue cycle.

HealthLeaders recently chatted with Dr. Arif Kidwai, president of St. Johns Radiology Associates, about the steps the organization took when implementing an AI-powered clinical documentation and workflow management solution and how it was able to avoid any major hurdles in execution.

HealthLeaders: Healthcare organizations have had a rough few years financially as they try to navigate inflation and labor shortages, among many other challenges, so this has led to a lot of leaders in your position to look toward technology to fill gaps and help their bottom lines. Can you tell us about the gaps that you were seeing at your organization and what technology you implemented to help fill those gaps?

Dr. Arif Kidwai: Yes, the last two to three years have been really rough for everybody in the healthcare industry across the board, radiologists included.

I've been fortunate to be a part of a hospital system where the executives are very proactive and ahead of the curve. They've always been aggressive with looking at new technology and trying to find ways to deliver healthcare more efficiently and provide better care for the patients.

About ten years ago, we started moving towards creating a better workflow within our own department and part of that process was to look for a new voice recognition system. At that time, we looked at a lot of the major players. But then we came across the 3M Fluency for Imaging product. For us, that was a game changer.

Once we started using a better workflow with a better voice recognition system, we were able to improve our turnaround times in radiology so that we had faster reports coming out to the clinic patients. We now have better accuracy in our reports because the voice recognition technology is the best that we've ever seen.

Having that voice recognition technology with a better workflow package made us better radiologist's both in quality and in our efficiency. Its something that we've seen now play out positively in the last three years, especially as things have even been more tight in the industry as the number of radiologists relative to the number of cases that we see annually has continued to grow and grow and grow.

There’s a great data graph out there that shows this gap between the increasing imaging volume year over year versus the relative flat number of radiologists that we've had nationally. And it's a challenge for everybody you know, as patient volume continues to grow and the shortage of clinicians persists. I think just finding that efficiency and the technology has been the only way to cope with that.

HealthLeaders: I know you said you're a part of a larger health system, so did you have to get an ample amount of buy-in from others in the system when it came to which solution you wanted to adopt?

Kidwai: We were really fortunate. When we were going through this process our chief medical information officer came to us and said the hospital organization wanted to buy one vendor product that would provide voice recognition software both in the radiology arena as well as hospitalwide for the new EMR that they were purchasing.

He came to me and said, ‘you know, at the end of this, it's the radiologists’ decision. You tell us what you like, and the hospital will follow.’ So, we worked hand-in-hand with his team, and we brought in all the major players at the time and we went through the standard inner product review of product demos.

For us, it was an easy decision. We had an ‘open mic night’ of sorts because our executives basically sat down in a room and had all the radiologist come in one by one. We came in, sat in the chair, and dictated into the microphone—signed in under a generic account with no voice training—and we just watched it work. It was really refreshing because technology before that had really been lagging as far as the radiologist expectations.

Everybody knew the pain of trying to correct reports, and to be able to sit down just see it work was really the thing that changed everybody's attitude about moving forward with new technology. That night we basically had a unanimous vote from the radiologists that this was the tech we wanted.

We went to the CMIO the next day and said, ‘this is our choice,’ and he smiled. He said, ‘that was my choice to, I just didn't want to tell you.’ That's how we as an organization came to this decision, and then we moved forward with it.

HealthLeaders: I frequently hear from other leaders that new technology is great, but implementation isn't always the easiest. So now that you’re over that hurdle, can you tell us a little bit about how implementation went at your practice and how you overcame any obstacles?

Kidwai: Yes, adoption of new tech is always a challenge for everybody. But prior to go-live our vendor did a lot of prep with our team. They did lot of training for our IT department. They came and they coached the radiologists of what to expect. Then on the go-live date they had trainers on site. We had both of our major sites covered with staff.

We also already had IT people that had been trained, so we were all ready for it. We also purposely decreased our outpatient volume for two days just to kind of handle the change and knowing that there would be a little bit of a kind of a learning curve to this.

But, for us, the shock was that after about three days, we were back to 100% productivity. And so, everybody went from being afraid of what's going to happen to three days later just simply doing our jobs again and forgetting that we had to go through this learning curve.

This interview is an excerpt. Listen to the entire interview here.