Transformation of Electronic Billing Systems From Military

Transformation of Electronic Billing Systems From Military Use to Public Medical Facilities

The advent of the twenty first century brings with the new dawning a time of extraordinary technological advancement, mega informational system development, and expanded scientific discovery. Without argument, these new developments bring with them an explosion in the informational database that must be reconciled and dealt with. No longer can service organizations and businesses rely on a central data base for gathering storing and retrieving information as these type of systems are unwieldy - and becoming more so. Individuals responsible for budgeting, marketing, invoicing, and consumer demographics are in need of immediate and accurate, ready-to-use, and updated information with respect to services and/or products offered. Unfortunately the healthcare industry has been slow in updating information retrieval systems in keeping with the need for immediate patient information retrieval and the dearth of new information being created.

The majority of healthcare systems are, unfortunately, are still captured in the era of the 1970's when centralized mainframe informational depositories were they only means for information storage. As such many healthcare systems continue to rely on a single financed-based system (billing and scheduling) wherein needed information is stored at a site that is not easily accessed for immediate usage. When information is stored at another site, getting the necessary information means requesting a report to be run which oftentimes is long in coming, inaccurate, not up-to-date, and limited. Further, the resulting report is generally paper generated and valuable time must be taken to transfer the information to a personal office computer for further use. The reasons for keeping with a centralized information program generally focuses around the concern of protecting patient information from non-approved personnel vs. The patient's welfare.