Belonging to the Porthaven Care Home Group, Prestbury House in Cheshire provides 24-hour residential, nursing, dementia and respite care for the elderly and delivers care services commissioned by Cheshire Integrated Care Board (ICB) for Continuing Healthcare (CHC) packages, including Funded Nursing Care (FNC).
The admin staff at Prestbury House have reduced their workload by an hour a day by digitising their financial processes with a helping hand from IEG4.
With the current processes at Prestbury House, Julie Lowndes (Office Manager) would spend up to an hour a day, tallying up the remittance advice notices with the invoices, to ensure that payments were made on time, for the requested amount, for the correct patient. With Patient Portal from IEG4 in place, this has now become an automatic process.
The portal also allows the team to notify the ICB when a patient is no longer in their care, which helps the finance teams for both the provider and ICB to keep up to date with patient balances and provides full transparency over each case to eliminate any communication errors or process gaps.
When we asked the staff at Presbury House, how they felt about the implementation process, the response was outstanding. The team was initially reluctant to change the process they currently had in place, despite it being a long-winded and manual process that was open to error. Now the Patient Portal is in place, they can’t believe the difference it has made to their processes. Julie Lonwdes commented:
“It is extremely efficient, easy to use and it benefits both the provider and the NHS. We are now saving around five hours a week on admin. I just wish we had it sooner.”
The new Health & Care Act Bill set out legislative changes which enable health and care organisations to work more closely together. This saw the abolishment of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) and the introduction of 42 Integrated Care Systems (ICS) in July 2022, which changed the way that healthcare is commissioned.
IEG4 provides an end-to-end Digital Continuing HealthCare (CHC) system which is in use at a number of place-based ICBs within the Cheshire and Merseyside region. The aim of the software is to:
Cheshire and Merseyside ICB (previously Cheshire CCG) approached existing software supplier IEG4, and asked them to expand the current capability of their existing digital solution to include the ability to record, manage and make payments of CHC; improve the processing of payments; and provide a streamlined process for the management of invoices within their care home settings. IEG4 recommended the adoption of Provider Portal, an online system that manages CHC payments and FNC packages.
In October 2022 Prestbury House agreed to be a pilot site and to implement the Provider Portal.
Many place-based ICBs within Cheshire and Merseyside will soon be following in the footsteps of Prestbury House in implementing Patient Portal.
IEG4’s Digital CHC system has many benefits that help both ICBs and care providers with the management of their patient records and financial systems. The introduction of the finance module from IEG4 has fundamentally changed the way ICBs and providers, record and process data and process payments.
Providers can use it to view and manage contract and payment information including:
To discover how Patient Portal can assist you in your processes, contact us and we can provide you with a demonstration of the system.
