The question I always pose to clients that use Press Ganey is, “Is it worth the time to automate the process that sends the update file from the monthly audit?”
A Press Ganey audit checks the data to see if there are any incomplete records before the data file is submitted to CMS. If incomplete records are found, the hospital group is notified.
The hospital then sends an update file to Press Ganey that includes the specific patient visit records that the Press Ganey Audit found to be incomplete. Since Press Ganey submits data to CMS for their clients, I would consider this to be very important. Our client wants to send as complete of a data set as possible. Usually, audits happen on inpatient data and sometimes Home Health data; however, I’ll specifically use inpatient data in my example.
Here is what the process looks like:
I sided with putting in the time to build automation for the process. Automating the file retrieval requires building a macro to download the file from the Improvement Portal. Since we needed to create this solution on a limited timeline, I suggested that we automate most of the process for now and manually retrieve the file until the next increment of the solution.
I started the automation process by building a table to hold the Visit ID’s we need to query. The table serves as a look-up table for the inpatient query and ensures we only pull those patients in the update file. Next, I built an SSIS package that imports the data from the exception file and then call a stored procedure that builds the Inpatient update file, encrypts the file, and sends it to Press Ganey.
The result was a two-to-three hour manual process reduced to less than 30 minutes.
