Revamping ASC Operations with HST

The Solution

As stated by Powers, there were 4 key factors that drew Children’s West to HST over other solutions-

1. They were drawn towards the extensive, comprehensive nature of the products offered by HST Pathways.
2. The user-friendly and intuitive aspects of the HST product suite greatly appealed to them.
3. The cost-competitive nature of the products proved to be economically beneficial.
4. HST’s ability to migrate their existing data, negating the need to maintain two concurrently running systems.

Children’s West implemented a suite of HST’s products to solve the pain points outlined above – HST’s surgery center management, scheduling & care communication, patient texting & pre-assessments, and HST’s patient estimates.

We chose HST because they have a complete package that is better than what the competitors offer – they were able to get us to where we are utilizing their technology to streamline, be more efficient, and also be more patient and family friendly as well.

Michael Powers
Administrator, Children’s Wests

The Results

Powers shared a handful of positive indicators realized from Children’s West’s experience since implementing HST:

Right off the bat, a significant improvement in response rate and time savings was observed when the center’s process transitioned from manually making phone calls to patients for their medical questionnaire, which required multiple attempts and presented considerable challenges, to HST’s patient engagement solution, that allows patients to access these forms online at their convenience.

With HST’s patient engagement solution, Children’s West was also able shift to text messaging for pre-op reminders and confirmations, which proved advantageous as it addressed the issue of patients not answering calls from unrecognized numbers or having inactive voicemails, thus eliminating the uncertainty around if they would show the day of surgery.. A similar transformation was seen post-op, where moving next day post discharge follow up to HST texting resulted in a notable increase in return rates within just the first week, which yielded more responses than the previous month combined.

Powers also shared the difficulties Children’s West previously grappled with operating multiple separate systems for registration, billing, medical questionnaires, and text messaging. These challenges were addressed through the implementation of the HST product suite.

The HST’s surgery center management solution was found to be user-friendly, greatly simplifying the process of generating regulatory reports for the state. HST’s reporting system is robust and intuitive, allowing for comprehensive analysis of data.

The OR schedule feature within HST’s scheduling & care communication provides Children’s West with detailed customization, and facilitates improved communication with surgeons. Changes in daily operations were also noted, such as the elimination of pre-registration due to the use of the HST’s patient estimates product for insurance verification. This change has resulted in heightened efficiency and accuracy in patient benefits while also ensuring compliance with the No Surprises Act. According to Powers, “the features and functionality are so much further ahead than anything we had experienced before.”