Consulting

Synapse Medical Services is delighted to announce that we are leading a national project to develop the non-admitted patient classification for the #Kingdom of Saudi Arabia across 9 clinical streams.

Project Team: Prof Kathy Eagar, Dr Margaret Faux, Annette Panzera, Heather Grain and Hala from our KSA partner, Anova Health.

The project is an initiative of the #National Casemix Centre of Excellence, aligned with #vision2030 of the Kingdom. 

The project team, led by Dr Margaret Faux, and with our KSA partner, Anova Health, and Australian company, Clarisoft , will design, test and pilot V1 of the classification, and make recommendations for V2 and beyond.

It is an honour to have been selected, and the team have been busy getting the project moving over the last few months. This project is a bit like building #Medicare from the ground up, and implementing it. Truly exciting!

Embassy Australia – Project Team

We are thrilled to be working on this groundbreaking project. Thank you to Australian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia H.E. Mark Donovan for the warm welcome in #Riyadh.

Our national non-admitted patient classification project team in the #Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been involved in two weeks of intensive workshops with stakeholders across the spectrum of healthcare delivery. 10 amazing days of wonderful clinician engagement, future planning and project delivery. Led by Dr Margaret Faux, Annette Panzera, Heather Grain, Michael Richter, Manal Al Khalifah, Hefin Jones, Ehab Alatassi and the wonderful Kathy Eagar.

Left: One of the workshops – Dialysis. Superb clinician engagement.
Right: Ehab Alatassi, Executive Director of National Casemix Center of Excellence, KSA and Professor Kathy Eagar.

One endeavour that Synapse Medical Services was delighted to be part of was the appointment of our CEO, Margaret Faux, as an honorary advisor to the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) in New Delhi, India.

This project was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation with the intention of mapping the legal and administrative infrastructure of health insurance in India.

This research role involved delving deep into the complexity of the operation of all health insurance schemes, both public and private, operating across the Indian subcontinent, and Margaret was thrilled to be asked to head up a team of brilliant Indian lawyers, economists and health policy makers to map every health insurance scheme in India. The project focused specifically on the underpinning legal infrastructure and mechanisms that move health dollars and facilitate health financing transactions.

India is looking at large scale health reform as it transitions to a universal healthcare system, whilst balancing that against a budget allocation of 2.5% of GDP.

Synapse holds our India roots alongside our Australian ones in importance and were viewed as a perfect voice of reason for such a large undertaking, due to our position in the healthcare sphere. Our unique position sitting at the interface of payers, providers and patients, allows us rare vision at the transaction level of health systems where precious health dollars are spent, and we are passionate about sharing this knowledge through education and consultancy projects.

Image: Margaret Faux with Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia HE General Sir Peter Cosgrove, AK, MC (Retired) in Chennai in March 2018, sharing stories of successful Australian businesses like Synapse in the south of India.

Another international consultancy project that Synapse has in progress currently is a one-time mapping of internal codes for a market leading government hospital in the Middle East.

The hospital had been using self-made internal codes that had developed over time. These codes for procedures and diagnosis meant very little outside of the facility.

The country in question was making the transition to ICD-10 AM and therefore this presented a significant problem with regards to data collection and reimbursement processes which are transitioning to DRGs.

Synapse is mapping 12,000 codes using a hybrid of Australian and U.S codes as per the clients’ requirements, including adding RVUs. This will facilitate a new system of data processing to be implemented across the facility.

This project involves significant resource, deep knowledge of international coding processes and internal training to explain why the changes were required.

This facility will soon be well placed for framework changes that are becoming mandatory at a national level.