Olympia-based Physicians of Southwest Washington (PSW) licensed the SymKey® for EZ-CAP® Professional and Hospital Claims modules for a three-year licensing period in August 2011, after a successful 30-day Risk Free Trial. Here’s what Tamra Ruymann, Claims Manager at PSW has to say about SymKey:
Return on Investment
“SymKey’s price tag was unbelievable! I didn’t think a small company like ours would be able to afford it, but the cost was so reasonable and the ROI was just amazing. I’m seeing a 3x return on my investment!”
Implementation
“The set-up and implementation was painless. When you said it would take three days to implement and move to production, I didn’t believe it. I was a project manager for large IT projects with the State of Washington and have never experienced such a seamless and short implementation. Instead of spending a week in training and weeks testing, we were live in three days.”
The Value of Automation
“We were initially only interested in the SymKey for EZ-CAP Professional Claims module because we had so many simple Professional claims to process that didn’t require the expertise of a claims processor. I knew that SymKey would save us a lot of time in manual work, and it did! But our Hospital claims were a different story – our custom interface tool passes data from EZ-CAP to our third-party MedAssets APC pricer and then exports the data to a spreadsheet so we can manually process each Hospital claim. I didn’t think that process could ever be automated, but it took HCIM only a couple hours to build a custom report for transferring data from the spreadsheet to SymKey for auto-pricing. This workaround saves a claims processor two days every week in Hospital claims adjudication, which allows for more time for other tasks. And since we were already licensing the Professional Claims module, the Hospital Claims module was half the price! I couldn’t believe the value.”
Minimizing Costs
“At our rate of growth, we’ve needed to hire more claims processors every year and I was actually down a claims processor when we started our SymKey trial, but our productivity has improved so much with SymKey that we don’t need to hire any new claims processors at this point. Because SymKey can handle all the claims we throw at it, we’re able to grow our business with a reduction in claims staff hiring.”
Operational Advantages
“Since we began using SymKey for EZ-CAP to process our Professional and Hospital claims, our turnaround time has improved noticeably. And SymKey’s a great tool for out of the ordinary claims processing projects. I’ve already used SymKey’s “Create Exact Claim Copy” scenario to reprice lists of claims at a line level – this saved a lot of time because many of the claims were multiple files and the manual process would have been very time consuming. SymKey also catches all our hard duplicate claims and pends them for review, which is fantastic.”