Promoting a Culture of Innovation at MEDHOST

Systemic innovation and experimentation are important at MEDHOST to ensure customers have the best tools available.

A culture of innovation focuses on customers with a wide-angle lens; not only tracking market trends but understanding needs before customers express them.

MEDHOST launched its first Hackathon in the fall of 2019 where cross-functional teams compete by taking an idea from conception to prototype in three days. Teams were required to propose ideas from one of three themes: existing product enhancements, new product development, and improving internal processes and/or efficiencies.

Teams were encouraged to be cross-functional to promote input from business and customer care specialists. Mentors also worked with teams to expand thinking in idea refinement, technical feasibility, business cases, and presentations.

The first MEDHOST Hackathon event had 19 teams submitting viable ideas; 15 of which became regular development projects. The winning team’s project was to automate elements of claim management providing both cost savings and reduction in processing time. This team automated logging into different payer sites and collecting structured claims information and grouping claims by denial reasons. Benefits to the facility included improving overall productivity, resource allocation, and cash flow.

Other noteworthy projects focused on improvement of manual cash posting process for remits, a data warehouse to generate analysis and YourCare Everywhere® reports, on improving remit processing by automatically processing of bank Lockbox PDF files and generating 835 files, and on automating MEDHOST Quality Management System’s audit process. Multiple 2019 Hackathon projects beneficial to customers are still in development.

Hackathon 2019 was a success and Hackathon 2020 is underway with many teams participating. These teams are focused on improving existing products and presenting new product ideas. Many of these ideas may be integrated in MEDHOST products in 2021. We would continue to strengthen our products to support our customers’ ultimate goal — providing excellent care to their patients. Stay tuned for our next update on Hackathon 2020!