Team Information

Shelley Sheppeck, shelley.sheppeck@colorado.edu
Jack Damico, jack.damico@colorado.edu

Who

Jessica Doty, Sr. Director of Administrative Services

What

The Speech, Language and Hearing Clinic’s (SLHC) need to begin filing health insurance claims, forced exploration of a new electronic health record (EHR) platform for the 3rd time! The RFP process was not looking positive, so I sought a relationship with Wardenburg Health Services (WHS). The SLHC-WHS partnership allows use of their Medicat system and professional support from WHS IT, training teams, and claims teams. In doing so, Medicat implementation, template building, training for new students and clinical faculty each year is done by WHS for SLHC. The $25K currently spent on an inferior EHR will be paid to WHS, thus keeping all money on campus. Additionally, SLHC will not need to hire a 1.0FTE for insurance claims processing as the WHS claims team will process SLHC claims as part of the MOU! SLHC-WHS has now created a model for Boulder campus small clinics, who can also take advantage of efficiencies and money saved, such as psychology, physiology and others to further reduce campus redundancies.

Why

In 2019, SLHC attempted file insurance claims for all clients to improve ACCESS to speech, language services to the disabled in our community. Failure to launch insurance was due to a poor EHR unable to support SLHC needs. Following the huge financial costs of COVID to the department and campus, filing insurance claims is a must. Beyond access for clients by accepting Medicaid, we will potentially increase revenue up to 350% and ensure HIPAA compliance.

When

This tool, the Medicat system, and the WHS support teams including, IT, business services, and informatics, is providing professional help to implement and begin claims filing this summer. Implementation of Medicat began in March 2021 following a year of discussions. The hard claims processing roll-out is fall 2021, and efficiencies will absolutely be needed for an incoming class twice the size of the normal incoming grad cohorts.