Cynthia Casatelli, Director of Administrative Systems at St. Joseph’s Heath in NJ, is a long-time user (and big fan) of Ras and dbtech. She’s used Ras throughout her career at other locations, but we spoke to Cynthia most recently about the implementation of the Rasi Downtime solution at St. Joseph’s Health.
St. Joseph’s Health serves nearly 1,000 beds system-wide, and had more than 1.6 million patient visits last year. While its main campus is in Paterson, NJ, there are over 3 dozen satellite sites across NJ. They are recognized yearly by US News & World Report as a Best Hospital in the NY Metropolitan area and are one of the Becker’s Top 150 Places to work in Health Care.
Cynthia Casatelli has been with St. Joseph’s Health since 2014, where she oversees the development and support of revenue cycle, material management, integration and business intelligence systems.
As anyone in Health Care knows, the challenges that go along with a downtime event are vast. But for the St. Joseph’s organization, they focused on the struggle to recover in Patient Access and Bed Management after the downtime event ends. Cynthia states their primary issue was paper. Patient information was being documented on paper that was sometimes lost, or handwriting was illegible. There was no quality data collection, no order to tracking and documenting patient updates and status transitions, and there was no easy way to keep the census balanced. When it came time to recover, data entry was a manual process, patient info was missing or incorrect, and the census took hours to balance. Resources that were needed to resume normal operations were tied up in downtime recovery.
When asked if St. Joseph’s considered any other solution before choosing Rasi Downtime, Cynthia expressed two main reasons why they had not. First, there was no other solution that could do what Rasi does. Cynthia explained that everything else is view-only and/or paper, whereas with Rasi, you can actually enter and edit data, store the data, and send it back out to an interface engine after the downtime event. “That ADT back to Soarian from Rasi is a huge benefit. It creates the record in Soarian Financials electronically, even if registration has to go back and verify (patient information)” said Cynthia. With an ADT interface from Rasi, recovery is much less manual and much more efficient. To quantify that, Cynthia and her team estimate that for every hour of downtime in the past, it took 2-3 hours to recover. Now that they use Rasi Downtime, it takes less than one hour to recover from a 1-hour downtime event. In addition to an improved recovery process, Rasi Downtime improves patient care with Rasi eForms. The Rasi eForms module allows the organization to print bands and labels during the downtime event, as well as other forms such as consents. Those forms can be saved into Rasi during the downtime event, and electronically exported out to another system. No manual processes, like printing and scanning.
The other reason that Cynthia and St. Joseph’s were confident in their decision to use Rasi Downtime is their experience with dbtech. Cynthia shared her feelings about having worked with dbtech for so many years. “dbtech is flexible, customer oriented, accommodating, and they understand the operations. dbtech will always support us and the product.”
St. Joseph’s Health has been using Rasi Downtime, primarily in the Emergency Department, for over a year now. We are currently working with St. Joseph’s to expand the Rasi Downtime solution to other departments, as well as for use during longer and more significant downtime events that are not limited to a single system outage.
For more information about Rasi Downtime, or any other Ras product, please visit us at www.dbtech.com or call 732-882-0200.