Six commonly asked questions about SIS Complete, SIS' all-in-one ASC technology solution that was built from the ground up specifically for the cloud.
About a year ago, I answered 11 of the most frequently asked questions asked of me during webinars about and demos of SIS Complete, our cloud-based ASC software platform that covers a surgery center's management and clinical documentation needs. I've continued to receive questions about the solution so I thought it would be a good time to answer six more of the most common questions. If you have a question about SIS Complete that's not addressed here, feel free to send it along to me at dsmith@sisfirst.com.
Q1: Does SIS Complete actually save an ASC money?
A: When I answered the last batch of FAQs, we were more in a place of telling ASCs that we believed SIS Complete would save them money and how we expected that savings would be achieved. A year and many installations of SIS Complete later, we're now at the stage where we can say we're past having anecdotal or perceived savings. We are actually seeing increased savings and operational efficiencies in a number of ways.
Q2: Where are users finding operational savings and efficiencies?
A: Let's look at one of the most obvious examples. ASCs typically pay somewhere between $5 to $10 per paper chart. When you implement SIS Complete, that immediately goes away. This is a concrete savings that's easy to wrap your head around. For every 1,000 paper charts, SIS Complete is saving an ASC somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000.
But where we see more significant improvements specifically concerning operational efficiencies is associated with an ASC's full-time employee (FTEs) responsibilities. We see ASCs with SIS Complete spending a lot less time on scheduling, preop calls, and other such tasks that are supported through the platform. The reallocation of FTEs and resources are allowing ASC staff to spend more time with patients.
Q3: How does SIS Complete support the exchange of information with other systems?
A: People are increasingly asking about interoperability. That's not surprising, considering the results of a recent Ambulatory Surgery Center Association (ASCA) survey on ASC EHRs revealed that interoperability is one of the top motivating factors for an ASC moving to an EHR. More specifically, ASCs want their platform to have the capabilities that will allow the solution to interact with clinic and hospital systems.
SIS Complete is on what we'd describe as next-generation interoperability: application programming interface (API). The old standard was HL7. API is an entirely different type of connection that is faster and more secure than HL7. With API, SIS Complete as a SaaS (software as a service) cloud-based system has more capabilities for interoperability than we ever had with a server-based system.
Q4: What is the importance of a discrete data system?
A: I love this question. We've talked about the importance of a discrete data system for some time, but people didn't always fully understand or appreciate its value and what it would give them. That's changing as users are getting to witness use cases firsthand.
We said that with a discrete data system, every data point you put into SIS Complete will be searchable and reportable. The use case for that is an ASC can run a query or report on any question in its documentation and get an answer. Those tasked with quality assurance (QA) for ASC love to hear this. For example, if you want to know how many of Dr. Smith's ACL patients complained of nausea and vomiting in recovery, you don't need to pull out 200 paper records and review them one by one. You can click a few buttons and run a report that will tell you which patients did or did not complain in just seconds. That's a gamechanger for QA but also for benchmarking and measuring improvements in all aspects of your operations.
Q5: When you say SIS Complete is designed for 100% virtual installation, do you really mean 100%?
A: Yes! We've completely changed the way we implement the platform. We no longer do massive on-site trainings and go-lives. That's a function of rebuilding the system in a simpler, more intuitive format. We completely rewrote SIS Complete so that it was easier for us to install and manage virtually. We have hundreds of installations that prove this approach is viable and successful.
Q6: How "complete" are you going to make SIS Complete?
A: Our goal has always been that when you go into SIS Complete, you never have to go anywhere else to get the information you need to run your ASC. That's what a "complete" system means to us. To this day, we're still working to achieve that goal. We've done so with physician engagement and patient engagement, and we've done so with electronic remittance posting and many other tasks. We have intentions to take it even further, such as eliminating the need to log on to Waystar or your market's Blue Cross Blue Shield. Those intentions will continue as long as there are ways for us to make SIS Complete even more complete.