Clinical productivity software maker Provation Medical has launched Apex, a cloud-based procedure documentation SaaS platform designed to improve outcomes, clinical efficiency and physician satisfaction in ambulatory surgery centers and hospitals.
Accessible on any internet-enabled device, Apex is designed to be intuitive and aligned with the physician’s workflow, according to the company. It provides guided capture of relevant details for more than 3,000 procedures in multiple specialties and automatically generates coding for all reimbursable actions.
“The Apex benefits – cloud-based, accessible on mobile devices and equipped with personalization features like machine-learned favorites – help drive clinical outcomes, productivity and physician satisfaction,” said David Del Toro, president & CEO of Minneapolis-based Provation, in a prepared statement. “We designed Apex to overcome common problems that erode overall performance, like inaccurate billing, operational inefficiencies and incomplete quality reporting.”
These features were designed to work together to help reduce the amount of time physicians spend on clerical and electronic health record (EHR) tasks. According to a 2017 report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, for every hour of clinical work, physicians spend two hours on clerical or EHR-related tasks.
The Apex software platform supports procedures ranging from common interventions to complex surgeries in gastroenterology, pulmonology, orthopedics and pain management, with more specialties planned.
The company also recently announced an upgrade of its original SaaS, ProvationMD, to streamline documenting and reporting high-volume procedures such as colonoscopies. Following a procedure, the physician can use the point-and-click program to generate a report that includes the requisite coding and images. Once the pathology report comes in, the program scrapes the text for keywords and populates the software to indicate which if any of the polyps removed is an adenoma (cancerous), reducing manual entry of pathology results.
The adenoma detection rate (ADR) represents a significant quality indicator for physicians and healthcare organizations under Medicare’s merit-based incentive payment system and aids in compliance with other certification and accreditation requirements. Research published in the New England Journal of Medicine reveals that, for every 1% increase in a physician’s ADR, a person’s risk of developing colon cancer decreases by 3%, and the risk of death from colon cancer falls by 5%.