Cardiff and Healthcare Synergy Announce Partnership to Benefit Home Healthcare Agencies

Cardiff, a division of Autonomy Corporation plc (LSE: AU. or AU.L) and leading provider of intelligent document solutions, today announced a partnership with Healthcare Synergy, Inc., a leading provider of software solutions to free-standing home healthcare agencies. Under the agreement, Healthcare Synergy will provide Cardiff® TeleForm®, part of Cardiff’s Intelligent Document solution for processing paper documents, as an add-on module to its Healthcare Assistant software to eliminate costly manual data entry and enable paper-to-digital processing.

The U.S. Government requires the more than 7,500 home healthcare agencies in the United States to regularly collect patient data to ensure they are receiving effective healthcare and for billing purposes. At the center of this process is a form developed by Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a standards organization, that nurses use to collect data by hand. However, the data must then be captured electronically, which requires manually key entry. With Cardiff TeleForm, nurses who use Healthcare Assistant can create OASIS forms and electronically scan the completed questionnaire, reducing the time spent to input data.

“The primary plan to utilize the TeleForm-based Scanning platform as a point of care tool is to augment the compliance process required by the state and federal regulators. Healthcare Synergy, Inc. endeavors to refine the field data collection methodology that would allow our clients to embed their clinical policies and procedures as part of the validation and business rules of the scanning tool. Therefore, allowing TeleForm to become a virtual clinical assistant for our end-users,” said Jude Mercado, President of HealthCare Synergy Inc. “Further, the Scanning solution can contain administrative costs by empowering data entry staff to become front-end editors and auditors. In preparation for Pay for Performance, we believe that the TeleForm product can serve as an excellent enhancement to HealthCare Assistant to implement electronic medical records data storage and retrieval that provides accurate and timely data while drastically reducing the clinical paper shuffling costs that will assist in maximizing our client’s profit margin. ”

Healthcare Assistant, which is already in use at more than 500 home healthcare organizations, is a proprietary software application designed to assist with billing to federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid. The Healthcare Assistant focuses on automating and enhancing the billing process for Medicare, Medicaid and private insurance with OASIS and 485 data collection, scheduling and payroll. Nomadic Scanning (an OASIS/Plan of Care scanning application) and Nomadic Web and PDA Edition (OASIS data collection tool), complements the HealthCare Assistant, giving home health agencies cost-effective and productive software.

“Healthcare professionals’ time is incredibly valuable and should be spent addressing patients’ needs, rather than be tied up tending to processes,” said Mark Seamans, General Manager of Cardiff. “Cardiff’s partnership with Healthcare Synergy will help ensure that these professionals can adequately meet government mandates by the most simple and cost-effective means.”

Bob Blair of Riverside Home Health said that one of his favorite add-on products of HealthCare Synergy is TeleForm which Health Synergy refers to as the Scanning Solution. He said during the interview for the Home Care Information Technology Council (HITC) Magazine “It allowed me to reduce the bottleneck in the office. Instead of hiring, other staff was freed and was able to do something else with their time other than typing in the OASIS.” The Scanning Solution allowed his agency to reduce the time it takes to enter a single assessment from 30 minutes to less than 5 minutes.

“The process is not as time consuming as before with manual data entry. I was able to do the chart and the OASIS together in five minutes. It is easy to use and much more efficient,” said Patrice Espinosa of HouseCalls Home Health Care Agency.