Patient access

Enhancing patient access to care

Start creating a compassionate care experience at the first patient touchpoint

According to findings from an Advisory Board survey¹, consumers are increasingly more engaged in personal health than before. On the journey to manage personal health and obtain care, patients engage in many touchpoints. When those touchpoints use disparate processes, it can be chaotic and make the patient journey unnecessarily complicated – not to mention distracting from the care. This reality is why Cerner focuses on surrounding the patient and creating continuity between digital and staff assisted engagements. 

Patient access is a clear area of opportunity to improve the patient's experience. Getting complete and accurate information from patients upfront is a necessary step to help manage your organization’s cash flow. By employing extensible automation and leveraging comprehensive patient records, Cerner is helping facilitate patient engagement. Healthcare may be changing. But our offerings put the patient's experience first by enhancing access to care and streamlining scheduling, financial clearance and registration workflows.

¹How Covid-19 Has Changed Consumer Communication, Safety, and Site of Care Preferences

Features

Scheduling

Cerner Scheduling Management workflows help patients determine the right appointment, location and time based on clinical need, insurance coverage, patient preferences, existing provider relationship and available appointment options. We coordinate appointment booking across venues of care by helping to streamline scheduling within a call center, department or medical practice.

Our workflows facilitate scheduling while taking into consideration the known patient information, enabling you to:

Proactively reach out to patients with clinical orders integration that helps book unscheduled appointments
Guide the scheduling workflow to determine scheduling needs based on symptoms, a series of rules driven questions, existing orders information and known patient information
Assist scheduling decision making through patient preferences (including provider sex, preferred time of day per day of the week and appointment reminder preferences) as well as known clinical order information
Show schedulers details on provider participation in out-of-network facilities based on the patient’s insurance coverage
Engage with patients about their schedule through the Cerner HealtheLife^SM portal

Financial clearance

Our financial clearance workflows target the pre-registration and intake experience by evaluating if data is accurate and up-to-date. These workflows minimize information that the patient is asked to verify again at pre-registration or arrival.

Cerner collaborates with third parties to support financial clearance activities for your organization and the patients you serve. Our suite of solutions and services is equipped with user-friendly workflows and reporting functions that help you confidently determine an appropriate financial pathway for your patients in near real-time.

Our collaboration with Experian supports financial clearance workflows and enables you to:

Verify that the patient’s address is valid and deliverable
Utilize data enrichment intelligence to complete insurance verification
Screen for additional coverage (including Medicaid) and financial assistance programs
Provide patients with a bill estimate prior to their visit
Create a personalized payment experience by assessing a patient’s unique financial situation
Facilitate prior authorization submission for approvals and denials
Inform payers who require notification when a patient has been placed in an observation status, admitted for or discharged from an inpatient stay

Registration

Cerner Registration Management is designed to provide users with a broad range of tools and workflows while simplifying the experience based on venue, role and operational procedures.

Our streamlined registration workflows enable you to:

Extend patient access to consumer self-service tools through APIs and embedded FHIR SmartApp technologies
Localize forms, quality edits and workflows using customizable rules
Focus staff workload with interactive, exception-based work lists
Manage waiting rooms with venue-specific registration workflows that connect to the clinical processes (for example, the short ED registration workflow adds patients to the ED tracking board for triage)
Update the clinical level-of-care and room charging with limited manual intervention by using patient status order integration
Collect co-pays or payments on outstanding balances prior to care being delivered

Cerner Scheduling Management, financial clearance workflows and Cerner Registration Management are part of our comprehensive patient access package, Engage and Access.

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FAQs

How does Cerner Patient Access leverage third parties?

Our technology can use HL7 as well as APIs. This connection helps streamline the user experience, and in some cases, provides advanced capabilities by combining Cerner data with partner data in ways that can drive decision making and workflows.

What third parties does Cerner Patient Access connect to?

Our current list of preferred supplier partners can be found here. However, if you have different third-party tools, Cerner Patient Access has the ability to connect through HL7 interfaces and APIs. The Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) has resources that can assist your support teams in leveraging APIs that Cerner has made available.

What is Cerner doing to enable interoperability and innovation?

The Cerner Open Developer Experience (code) encourages innovators to build apps that advance the health care industry through improved interoperability capabilities. Utilizing Cerner Ignite APIs℠ allows us to scale and better support our API-enabled innovation and health care market. Third party and client developers will find that this approach means that there is extensibility in the applications that are developed and can be more easily transferable.

How does Cerner Patient Access help manage duplicate patient records?

Cerner Patient Access uses a single patient record to keep care, demographic and historical documentation linked for clinical decision making and consumer personalization. With an enterprise master person index, your teams can identify and resolve duplicate records to facilitate the integrity of a single person record. Advanced automation capabilities are available with the Cerner HealtheIntent^SM MPM (Master Person Management) API which can assist with the identification and combining of your patient records.