Provider education for our South Region TRICARE providers is very important. Marketing and education materials are abundant and include:
 

• Monthly/quarterly bulletins and newsletters
• Annually updated provider handbook
• Job aides/charts/brochures
• Remittance messaging
• Autofax memos

Formal documents, such as the newsletters, bulletins and the provider handbook, are also available online. Providers have ample information available to them through Online Provider Services and PCM Central, including self-study training modules. These tools are available for you and your office staff in order to understand provider business with TRICARE and make all of your transactions effortless.

Provider seminar availability in your area is also offered. Network providers are given two opportunities each year to sign up for and attend a local seminar for education. These are usually scheduled in the spring and fall of each year.

Non-network providers are offered a single seminar each year in order to ensure provider understanding of the TRICARE program and any changes that have occurred during the past year. Please be sure to check the most current seminar listing in your area. You may schedule space at the seminars and RSVP online for you and/or your office staff’s attendance.

Provider Relations Representatives focus on the needs of South network providers who are seeing TRICARE beneficiaries. Provider Relations Representatives are located throughout the South Region for visits to primary care managers and other network providers, by request.

As a network provider for Humana Military, you can find out who your provider representative is by calling 1-800-444-5445. Your call will be directed to the provider representative in your geographic area.

Back to Top

Naval Hospital Pensacola Pioneers Technology  (Article 3) 

Although surgical patients might not notice it as they count backward from 10, a new technology in the operating room at Naval Hospital (NH) Pensacola is revolutionizing operating room procedures.

NH Pensacola is the first military treatment facility (MTF) and the first of any Florida hospital to implement DocuSys technology, which includes Anesthesia Clinical Information Management (DocuSafe) and IV Medication Management (DocuJect) Systems.

It’s enhancing patient safety in numerous ways, from reducing medication errors to capturing vital information and sounding an alert if something isn’t right. “I’m pleased we made this investment in leading-edge technology to enhance our patient safety,” says anesthesiologist Cmdr. Craig Bonnema. “In my position as director of surgical services, I’m also keen about its impact on workload. This makes my job easier.”

• Monitoring and recording vital functions such as blood pressure, heart rate, respiratory rates and anesthesia gas levels.
  • Freeing doctors of these mundane but vitally important tasks lets them focus more intently on the patient.
• Reducing medication error through bar-coding technology.
  • Whenever a drug is administered intravenously, DocuSys inspects the syringe label for everything from the type and dose of medication to the expiration date. At the same time it checks for patient allergies and interaction with other patient medications. If anything is awry, it issues a warning.
• Providing a database with information that can significantly improve management and operations.
  • At the end of each operating procedure, DocuSys provides a clean record of data that allows anesthesiologists to evaluate the workload in a more specific and effective manner. Now it’s possible to examine exactly how workload is generated, from the length of procedures to decisions on more expensive drugs or more cost-effective ones.

Anesthesia is unique among all the medical practices in its difficulty to quantify workload, which is based on factors such as the length of time and type of procedure. DocuSys solves this problem by capturing all the necessary information into quantifiable units that can be compared.

“Day to day it’s like a silent partner in the OR assisting us,” says Cmdr. Bonnema. “Now I have the data I need to optimize resources. I would be guessing before, but now I can quantify it.”

DocuSys is only one of the advanced technologies employed by the hospital. Others (which include robotic medication refill systems and electronic medical records) along with DocuSys are believed to be factors favorably impacting customer satisfaction. Survey scores for NH Pensacola exceed the averages across the board of all military health care facilities and civilian HMOs.

“This may be something not just the Navy but all of the military would be interested in installing across the enterprise for patient safety and workload quantification,” Cmdr. Bonnema concludes.

Back to Top

Last Reviewed:  February 7, 2007