Collaboration, patience and creativity enable all parties to bring comprehensive healthcare IT solution online during national COVID-19 pandemic

Medsphere Systems Corporation, the leading provider of affordable and interoperable healthcare information technology (IT) solutions and services, today announced that the Arkansas State Hospital (ASH) is now caring for Arkansas’s most vulnerable citizens with comprehensive IT support from Medsphere’s CareVue Cloud electronic health record (EHR) and RCM Cloud revenue cycle solutions. Based in Little Rock, ASH is a previously paper-based acute psychiatric inpatient facility with 222 beds across three areas of care: general adult, forensic, and adolescent.

“This is a tremendous step forward for the entire ASH staff and for our patients, who are now receiving more coordinated, comprehensive care enabled by the Medsphere platform,” said ASH CEO James Scoggins. “We asked a lot of the Medsphere team during implementation, and COVID-19 demanded much more than would normally be required. They responded creatively by finding ways to safely complete the implementation and by updating the solutions to accommodate our workflows. The move from paper will automate many tasks that were previously manual and streamline our entire organizational structure.”

Implemented together as software as a service (SaaS) solutions, CareVue Cloud and RCM Cloud provide a full suite of clinical, revenue cycle and financial components available through Amazon Web Services. The combined solution ASH now uses includes a number of updates, some of which were requested by ASH and others that emerged from Medsphere’s development pipeline. An improved pharmacy interface, enhanced note taking and treatment planning functionality, fully automated incomplete record tracking, and an updated superbill module to capture more charges will enable ASH staff to focus more on patients and less on the back office tasks that previously occupied much of their time.

“Congratulations for the successful implementation at ASH goes primarily to the implementation team and the  staff, who took ownership of the system early on and made the project their own,” said Medsphere president and CEO Irv Lichtenwald. “No EHR, regardless of how costly, will prove effective if the users don’t embrace and make it an essential part of their daily tasks, and ASH has done that. We appreciate their flexibility and resourcefulness during a pandemic, which complicated but did not halt the entire process.”

During implementation, Medsphere coordinated with both ASH and the Arkansas Department of Health to accommodate the needs of both the hospital and the statewide agency. This coordinated approach improved ASH’s ability to rapidly meet reporting requirements at both the state and federal levels.   

About the Arkansas State Hospital

The Arkansas State Hospital (ASH) is the state’s only acute psychiatric inpatient hospital. ASH’s mission is to provide psychiatric services that promote recovery in a safe and caring environment. The hospital is licensed by the Arkansas Department of Health and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and are accredited by Joint Commission (JC).