Melbourne hospital embraces electronic claims
Melbourne hospital embraces electronic claims
The Royal Melbourne Hospital is the first public hospital in Australia to send electronic claims to health funds, following the State government's plans to modernise hospitals amid growing concerns over patient deaths from medical mistakes.
The hospitals' patient management system has been integrated with ICSGlobal's THELMA (Transactional Health Exchange Linking Multiple Applications), which works like a clearing house for the health industry.
THELMA replaces manual, paper-based health administration processes, for example, patient eligibility checking and claims, from the domain of healthcare providers, with intelligent technologies that allow these same processes to be done as electronic transactions over the Internet.
Hundreds of millions of administration transactions, such as these, are carried out in the Australian health industry, but now customers will be able to use this service much more conveniently.
The Royal Melbourne Hospital is part of Melbourne Health, Victoria's second largest public health service, which has 1,200 beds across inpatient, community and residential services.
Research company Gartner has praised the THELMA system because it connects a huge range of disparate software systems to allow a patient's treatment to be tracked from GPs through to hospitals.
The link to the THELMA system will also provide the opportunity for other public hospitals across Victoria and South Australia to use the electronic claims system too.
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