The Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) has selected PatientKeeper to supply mobile software for Palm OS and Pocket PC handhelds to its physicians. The selection follows a three- month study that the hospital and PatientKeeper claim drew positive responses from physicians and a 15 percent increase in revenue due to improved charge capture at the point of care.

The Department of Medicine at Brigham has a staff of some 800 faculty members, about one-third of which have at least part-time clinical responsibilities seeing patients. The rest are involved in medical research at this Harvard Medical School affiliate hospital.

"We started looking at systems for handheld charge capture about a year ago when we noticed that our monthly billings did not match our patient census and complaints by doctors that they were doing too much clerical work," said Dr. Monte Brown, vice chairman of the department of medicine at BWH. "By surveying the number of patients under our doctors' names and comparing that to the number of bills, we found a significant gap. As a result, we began exploring technological solutions that could solve the problem while reducing costs."

After selecting PatientKeeper in January, Dr. Brown said he worked with PatientKeeper to have his new system up and running within six weeks, including a number of custom features such as a counter that displays the number of bills the doctor has issued that day and unique pop-up windows that remind doctors to use specific modifiers when appropriate. The study continued through the end of May with about 20 physicians, both full-time and part-time.

In addition to a charge capture capability, the Department of Medicine said it required that the handheld system have built-in wireless for future connectivity, that it be easily customized by hospital staff, that it work equally well on both Palm and Pocket PC devices, and most importantly, the system needed to offer both charge capture and a full suite of clinical applications.

According to PatientKeeper, the PatientKeeper Charge Capture Application Suite automates a billing process that typically relies on individual billing cards. Instead of jotting information on the cards, doctors use the PatientKeeper system to simply check off the customizable diagnosis codes and services performed on their handhelds. The PatientKeeper Clinical Application Suite consists of a variety of tools for reading and analyzing all types of patient data such laboratory results, medication lists, allergies, and clinical documentation.