TODAY'S BUSINESS CHALLENGE:

Janet belongs to a team of nurses employed by a large teaching hospital. Their job is to go out into the community and administer home health care (primarily to shut-ins and patients who are recuperating from surgery). With the advent of managed care, Janet and her colleagues are forced to do more paperwork than ever before. This limits the amount of time they have to do the part of their job they love the most -- taking care of patients.

Janet's nursing supervisor, Belinda, would love to free up some of her staff's time so that her nurses could see more patients. But, try as she might, she cannot find the key to lightening the administrative load on her nurses.

TOMORROW'S BUSINESS SOLUTION:

Working with Alert & Oriented Medical Transcription Services, Belinda learns the value of timely patient documentation in the era of managed care. In her next meeting with the hospital administrator, she asks why only doctors are allowed to dictate patient reports when nurses represent an equally important part of "the patient care team" -- and the work they do has an equal impact on a patient's health.

Belinda makes a strong case to the startled hospital administrator for allowing her home health nurses to dictate their reports over the phone. She points out that if the hospital had this information stored in electronic format (instead of on paper), her nurses' reports could be submitted to a third-party payer electronically for reimbursement. Not only would this speed up payment from insurance companies and strengthen the hospital's cash flow, filing reimbursement claims electronically could accomplish much more: It could develop a repository of patient data capable of being parsed and sold to market analysts doing research for drug companies.

After doing some research, the hospital administrator realizes that the money gained from selling patient data for research purposes could easily cover the costs of transcribing the nurses' dictated reports. The result? Janet and her fellow nurses -- who now dictate their reports -- are happier. Belinda is happier. The hospital administrator (who has found a new source of revenue) is happier. And the marketing analysts for the drug companies are much, much happier.