T-System Celebrates 20 Years of Advancing Care Delivery and Financial Outcomes for Emergency Departments, Freestanding Emergency Centers and Urgent Care
DALLAS (PRWEB) June 23, 2016 -- This week, T-System, Inc. will recognize its 20-year anniversary as a leading provider of healthcare IT solutions for episodic and emergency care. The company credits its long-standing success to remaining focused on its foundation – an organization built by and for clinicians and delivering outcome-focused solutions that align with clinical needs. T-System began as the nation’s first company to develop a template-based documentation system for patient encounters in the fast-paced emergency department. The goal was to help clinicians see patients more quickly and create a more thorough record of the patient’s visit.
“T-System strives to create efficiencies within emergency care and drive positive change in healthcare overall. That’s at the core of our foundation,” said Roger Davis, president and chief executive officer of T-System. “I believe our strategic leaders, loyal client base, and the continuous market demand for patient-centric technology solutions designed specifically for emergency care has fueled T-System’s growth over the last 20 years.”
As the industry has undergone significant changes over the course of T-System's history, the organization made a commitment to staying ahead of the curve. With increased technology adoption, T-System quickly developed EV, an electronic version of its paper documentation system, T-Sheets. A comprehensive ED information system (EDIS), EV, continued to allow clinicians to spend more time with patients, in addition to improving care quality, reducing medical errors and organizational costs, and helping their organizations demonstrate Meaningful Use (MU). Since that time, T-System has focused on setting up its customers for success in addressing regulatory changes, like the introduction of MU and more recently ICD-10. T-System rounded out its full-suite of solutions, adding RevCycle+ to drive innovation in ED coding and improve the financial health of emergency care.
Today, the new focus from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is shifting the conversation from simply mandating the use of technology to demanding better outcomes as a result of technology use. A key component of this has been interoperability and demand for open application programming interfaces (API). To ensure technology is helping create a more interoperable system, T-System has made a commitment to open APIs and foster an environment of openness and free flow of data. This decision is helping providers access and share data at the moment of care for improved clinical outcomes. Interoperability is the driving force behind a better healthcare system, and T-System’s solutions have evolved and will continue to evolve to meet the demands of its customers, the lives they serve, and the industry as a whole.
“The future of emergency medicine and the increased delivery of care in settings like urgent care and freestanding EDs will be challenging, yet exciting,” said Davis. “We will continue to take aggressive steps to make sure T-System always understands better than anyone how care delivery in the unscheduled environment is evolving. We commit to being the go-to experts and thought leaders in the field of emergency medicine.”
Since the inception of the ACA, unscheduled care entities have grown dramatically due to the convenience, quality of care, and cost of care that these organizations provide. It's estimated there are currently 500 freestanding emergency centers (FSEC) in the U.S., and approximately 9,300 walk-in, stand-alone urgent care centers in the U.S. with 50 to 100 new clinics opening every year. As the “retailization” of healthcare continues to grow, patients will continue to shop and seek care at sites that offer such conveniences. T-System has proven success in providing healthcare technology to advance care delivery and financial outcomes for this care environment. The company now provides solutions to more than 1,400 EDs in the U.S., in addition to serving 58 percent of the FSEC market. T-System has recently developed key strategic partnerships to support its growth, including one with Presidiohealth to create the first-of-its-kind integrated technology platform to drive efficiencies in business operations for FSECs. In addition, the company now serves the two largest FSEC networks in the U.S, First Choice Emergency Room and Neighbors Emergency Center.
T-System was founded in 1996 by emergency medicine physicians Woodrow Gandy, M.D. and Robert Langdon, M.D. Frustrated with skyrocketing patient volume and complex charting and billing documentation processes, the practicing physicians created a template documentation system to help ED clinicians chart and solve up to 150 patient complaints in a visual way. Drs. Gandy and Langdon initially envisioned the system as a software program but decided to first perfect the templates on paper, incorporating clinician feedback from thousands of patient encounters. In 2001, the paper template system called T-Sheets® was adapted and expanded into a comprehensive EDIS known today as T-System EV®.
About T-System
T-System is a healthcare IT company that advances care delivery and financial outcomes for episodic care. Specializing in emergency department documentation since 1996, T-System has since expanded its focus to include the development of innovative solutions for the rapidly expanding episode-based care market, including hospital-based emergency departments (EDs), freestanding emergency centers and urgent care centers. Through clinically-driven services and documentation solutions as well as charge capture and coding solutions, T-System solves clinical, financial and operational challenges for our clients. About 40 percent of the nation’s hospital-based EDs, freestanding emergency centers and urgent care centers use T-System to improve the clinical encounter, including the documentation of the patient visit as well as the downstream outcomes related to that event. For additional information about T-System, please visit http://www.tsystem.com.
Bethany Parker, T-System, +1 (615) 577-1131, [email protected]
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