Sutter Community Connect        

Yes, clinical data will be integrated in a single secure database that allows clinicians to access and share clinical information across care settings. Sutter Community Connect leverages the same Epic software technology, templates, and build in use by Sutter Health, while allowing for some personalization at each independent practice. Our Sutter Community Connect program is recognized as a Connect Accredited Site, having demonstrated happy Connect sites, good Epic use, and following Connect best practices.

This Complete EHR is 2015 compliant and has been certified by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology (CCHIT®), an ONC-ATCB, in accordance with the applicable certification criteria for eligible clinicians and hospitals adopted by the Secretary of Health and Human Services. This certification does not represent an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or guarantee the receipt of incentive payments.

No. Your patient and practice information is separate and secure. Information pertaining to your practice, its workflow and billings are owned by your practice and is not accessible by others who use Sutter Community Connect. Furthermore, due to contractual obligations, Sutter Health cannot access this data without consent.

The system is extremely secure from outside threats. Sutter Health uses Cylitic Security to provide your practice with the third-party risk management tools and resources needed to reduce the risk of cyber security threats, at no additional cost to you. Extensive physical safeguards, electronic, and administrative safeguards have been implemented to ensure the data is protected.

To achieve requirements for participation in the Quality Payment Programs, physicians and other clinicians will have to adopt a certified EHR and use it not just to document care, but to facilitate improved care. While Epic is a certified EMR, your practice will be responsible for documenting and reporting Quality Program data for participation. Epic has reports to assist you in reporting on the measures.

Sutter Community Connect makes registration intuitive and efficient. It provides tailored workflows and extensive error checking to help users complete registrations swiftly and accurately.

When a patient calls for an appointment, the office staff can collect detailed patient demographics, insurance and guarantor information. The collection of this detailed demographic data is required if you are choosing to participate in the Quality Payment programs. Specific fields within the system ensure the completeness of the information, which also helps your billing office process a clean claim to expedite payment.

Additionally, because the system is tied to Sutter Health’s clinical data repository and EHR system, if the patient has been seen in any Sutter-partnered facilities, the information can automatically pre-populate most of the necessary fields.

Using an optional module, your office staff can also obtain the latest and most accurate payer information. This verifies the patient’s eligibility for coverage, thus reducing claim denials.

The guarantor information, however, is specific to your practice and is not shared across the Sutter Community Connect network. The system is designed to maintain the privacy and security of your financial data.

Sutter Community Connect makes it easy for users to schedule any type of visit or procedure from anywhere in your organization. It also enhances your ability to keep appropriate slots in your schedule open, take patient preferences into account and deliver high-quality service that can differentiate your organization.

The Sutter Community Connect scheduling application allows users to schedule a variety of visits and procedures from anywhere in their practice, and, as part of an integrated system, shifts seamlessly between other practice management applications.

The system comes with a library of approximately 500 appointment types, any of which can trigger flags to the schedulers to provide additional instructions to patients – for example, whether a patient should fast before an appointment, or arrive early for their next visit.

The most obvious feature of the scheduling application, however, is its flexibility to be customized. Physicians can customize appointment types into templates that help identify the duration of appointments, or whether or not special equipment will be needed for appointments or procedures. This comprehensive rules-based scheduling application allows each physician to define their own appointment durations according to specific appointment types.

The integration of the scheduling system with both the registration application and electronic health record make the scheduling process seamless and intuitive for you and your staff.

Sutter Community Connect can help reduce A/R days, facilitate accurate claims, allow paperless collection processes and streamline data entry. With Sutter Community Connect, your billing office can track revenue from individual billing entities. Its configurable library of medical necessity checks and charge/claims scrubbing routines help you reduce denials and satisfy demanding payers.

Sutter Community Connect includes an automated claims, billing and collection application that seamlessly integrates with all other practice management modules within the system. When a physician documents a patient visit, the system automatically generates charges based on diagnosis codes, tests and other procedures conducted during the time of the appointment.

Once a patient encounter is documented and the physician closes the record, a detailed algorithm is used to compare the charges against the patient’s demographic information to ensure the diagnosis code is appropriate. If the system detects a possible error, it generates a flag for the biller to follow up.

The Sutter Community Connect billing module allows billers and office managers the ability to run revenue management reports in real time to get a clear visual snapshot of the accounts receivable as well as trends over time.

Sutter Community Connect is designed to ensure ease of navigation, seamless integration with patient registration and the medical record, and to reduce aging accounts receivable to improve cash flow to independent practices.