SIX STEPS TO IMPROVE YOUR REVENUE CYCLE PERFORMANCE

Transcription

1 SIX STEPS TO IMPROVE YOUR REVENUE CYCLE PERFORMANCE Let s face it, unstructured business content the that resides outside core systems and processes plagues every healthcare organization. For patient care, it s the patient everything from IDs and insurance cards to consent forms and waiver documents that exists outside of your electronic medical record (EMR). In patient financial services, it s the correspondence, EOBs and related content living outside of your billing and financial systems. In accounting, it s the invoices and supporting documentation surrounding specific financial transactions that lay beyond the reach of your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The list goes on. By its very nature unstructured content annoys us. We store it somewhere and forget about it. Then, when we need it, we can t find it, leaving us to wonder if it s been lost or just misplaced. Quite simply, it impedes our ability to do our jobs effectively. Here s the good news: You can take control of your business office. And, you don t necessarily have to replace your hospital system (HIS) solution to do it. In this ebook, we ll look at six, simple steps to increase productivity, improve cash flow and enhance customer service by managing your unstructured content.

2 : of your workflow to eliminate bottlenecks No matter which department they re in, staff need to complete tasks. Enterprise content management (ECM) electronically captures your organization s diverse range of in its native format and makes it available sooner and more accessible. This includes everyting from EOBs and correspondence to faxed orders or requests for, denied claims, insurance cards, patient IDs and more. Your end users access what they need immediately with the click of a mouse. Capturing this at the beginning of your workflow ensures it will be available to the people who need it, how they need it, when they need it eliminating bottlenecks that may occur further along in your business processes, procedures and activities. But, capturing unstructured content is only the beginning.

3 : Automate processes Spending time sifting through a stack of EOBs for a single piece of paper reduces the time your patient account representative has to spend collecting outstanding accounts. ECM utilizes sophisticated business process tools to automatically index the right, routing it to the right staff, as soon as it enters the system. These workflows improve efficiency and productivity while keeping staff focused on higher-value tasks. And, because the same business the HIS application requires doubles as keyword index and bank reconciliation values, ECM also eliminates error-prone manual data entry. This is revenue cycle management (RCM) powered by ECM. The time and cost savings you ll recoup on storage, indexing and filing alone will demonstrate the kind of return on investment that is sure to please everyone in your organization.

4 : Many solutions stop at this point. But if the data is not accurate, it has little-to-no real value. That s why today s best-practice ECM solutions include client-definable data validation routines that scrub extracted data and help determine the validity of converted data values. With reimbursement rates shrinking and the cost to collect increasing, every denied claim represents an additional $25 to $30 in costs. Consider even one single physician practice with a 5% to 8% denial rate: the difference between a 5% and 12% first-pass denial rate could mean $70,000 in lost annual revenue. Data validation routines help ensure data accuracy before generating the desired output. Users have the ability to correct any errors that may be found by simply keying the correct, selecting data from a drop-down list or auto-populating the data from a database lookup. This ensures that correct is available for resolving issues in patient billing, denied claims, disputed contractual amounts or other patient inquiries.

5 : Safely store your to remain compliant Once you ve captured and cleansed your unstructured content, you need to securely store it. Storing your business content electronically in a single, centralized ECM repository reduces security risks. It also reduces complexity in your IT environment by eliminating disparate, disconnected content silos. An ECM solution securely stores this content, allowing access only to authorized users, which minimizes risks of HIPAA violations. Additionally, combining an RCM solution with ECM provides comprehensive audit trails, making it much easier to comply with third-party audits like The Joint Commission, Sarbanes-Oxley and other initiatives.

6 : your core to foster user ECM integrates with your organization s core to provide staff with instant access to content from within the systems they work in every day. Ideally, staff aren t even aware that they re using an ECM solution. For users in patient financial services, it means finding transactional billing data directly within the billing system instead of on a paper EOB or in an isolated EDI transaction. For staff in finance and accounting, it means automating your month-end bank reconciliation and associated journal entries to your G/L system. Users have everything they need within your G/L, ERP, Health Information, registration, billing and other line-of-business systems, increasing staff productivity while enhancing the value of your existing systems.

7 : Get your data working for you for more accurate reporting Now that you ve captured, validated, safely stored and integrated your data with systems, put it to work. Native reporting tools provide visibility into transactional processes to help you make sure your financial operations run smoothly. Create dashboards to balance workloads or provide drill-down business analytics to identify collections trends with outcomes, integrate daily cash receipts to the bank deposits for reconciliation even forecast future cash flows from unbilled charges. Users, managers, directors and executives work more efficiently within predictable parameters. As a result, your operations run more smoothly and efficiently with happier and more productive staff.

8 Take control of your business office by managing unstructured content Any time staff have difficulty finding what they need to work effectively, they ll become frustrated while processes slow to a crawl. Pairing RCM technology with ECM helps you turn that source of frustration into a foundation for efficiency, increasing cash flow while creating happier end users empowered to provide improved customer service. Learn more at OnBase.com/Healthcare» 2016 Hyland Software, Inc. All rights reserved