After years of planning and many months of hard work by hundreds of people, another significant investment at UTMB Health is ready to bear fruit. The utmbConnect project “went live” on Saturday, April 6.  
 
The initiative puts in place a new scheduling, registration and billing system, and greatly enhances UTMB Health’s ability to efficiently and effectively serve our patients, ensure our financial health and fully comply with requirements of the Affordable Care Act and federal regulations.
 
utmbConnect provides a number of benefits for faculty, staff and patients - including our many employees who choose the university for their health care:
  • All information about a patient’s care will be combined into one record, allowing physicians and other caregivers to efficiently retrieve complete, current information and easily document care.
  • Patients will receive one simplified bill that includes all hospital, clinic and provider charges.
  • MyChart users will now also have access to statements and billing information as part of their personal record, inside the MyChart tool.
  • The system improves communication and uses best-practice tools to enhance care and improve safety.
  • Service will be more personalized by integrating all business aspects of a patient’s care.
      
What did it take to make this happen? A Herculean effort on the part of hundreds of employees. Take two recent weekends as an example, when 300 UTMB employees worked Saturdays and Sunday on converting  thousands of records that were needed in the new utmbConnect system before it could launch. The work was completed ahead of schedule. 
 
Registrars created 70,092 new Hospital Account Records (HAR), built new guarantor accounts for the associated patients and converted 64,812 appointments from Invision into the new system. The Change Center, established on campus to support incoming questions and issues with the scheduling and registration systems, successfully resolved more than 200 issues during the weekend. (see photo gallery)
 
Thank you to all of the utmbConnect teams that made this project possible and successful, and to the many who worked to make the final push this past weekend.