Rebekah Children’s Services Uses myAvatar to Reach Ambitious Goals

Rebekah Children’s Services has been helping children find homes, get treatment and overcome obstacles for over 115 years. From locations in Gilroy, Salinas and Campbell, Calif., the organization serves children and families from all over the state. Throughout this long history, the organization has evolved as the needs of families and children have changed. As part of that evolution, Rebekah was ready to start using data to drive better decision-making and enhance care, as well as pursue incentive funds for the meaningful use of electronic health records (EHRs).

Meaningful use and ease of use

“Our ultimate goals were to drive down costs and improve outcomes,” said Scott Olson, IT manager at Rebekah. “We wanted fewer billing errors, faster notes turnaround, clinical decision support and a system that didn’t require much training. If it isn’t easy to use, our clinicians will not adopt the system – and we won’t see the benefits we were looking to gain.”

“We needed to maximize our internal resources, and we wanted to be on the leading edge of meaningful use,” he continued. “We chose myAvatar for its ability to help us do all those things.”

The fact that everything requires just a few clicks was huge, as were the speed of progress reports and the time savings.

Scott Olson, IT Manager, Rebekah Children’s Services

Training and go-live exceed expectations

The implementation process started with a two-week training initiative that was divided between documents and job roles. The results exceeded expectations.

“People were up and running on it in a fraction of the time we expected,” said Olson. “The go-live was equally smooth. We had folks standing around ready to help with issues, training or adoption but they really weren’t needed. We used that time to clean up billing issues from our old system – getting charges in the right buckets and such,” Olson recalled. “Our Netsmart onsite team was very helpful.”

Rebekah also got a little help from its friends.

“We’re fortunate that there’s a very strong Netsmart user community in California,” said Olson. “The national user group was very valuable to us, and we now have four myAvatar user organizations within an hour’s drive of us.”

Scoring points with clinicians and associates

Clinicians and associates were front and center throughout the successful upgrade to myAvatar. Using the new EHR, they were able to consolidate multiple reports into one and gain an overview of which documents were due, approved and in process.

“They love it,” said Olson. “It’s easy, takes few steps and is user-friendly. The fact that everything requires just a few clicks was huge, as were the speed of progress reports and the time savings. And the ease of updating clinical forms has been tremendous. With our old system, our users were satisfied. With myAvatar, they were impressed.”

Positive reactions from clinicians included better access to clinical information, the ease of monitoring progress and streamlined paperwork.

In addition to happy clinicians, Rebekah also saw a healthier bottom line. In the first month alone, late service data entries were reduced by 50%, speeding up the billing cycle and putting $92,000 into accounts receivable 30 days sooner.

Over the first year, those efficiencies helped increase revenue by 33% and provided the time necessary to do more evaluation and analysis, preventing future billing errors. Fewer billing errors, faster notes turnaround and year-over-year improvements were the goals. And thanks to myAvatar, Rebekah Children’s Services can say “mission accomplished.”