As the American healthcare industry is charged with redefining financial responsibility in episodes of care, progressive thought leaders and administrators in the revenue cycle space are increasingly vital in helping hospitals maintain fiscal footing.
Becker's Hospital Review's RCM Leaders to Know series aims to highlight those revenue cycle leaders working to bridge the gaps between volume, value and efficiency in healthcare reimbursement. Micheal Orseno, vice president of revenue cycle at Regent Surgical Health in Westchester, Ill., spoke with Becker's about how Regent has been tackling RCM across their surgical centers.
Prior to joining Regent, Mr. Orseno served as revenue cycle administrator for the Chicago Institute of Neurosurgery and Neuroresearch. He received a bachelor's degree in public administration from Augustana College and a master's degree in health systems management from Rush University Medical Center.
Question: What is the most critical area in your health system's revenue cycle that you plan to address this year?
Michael Orseno: There are two areas where we are going to be focusing our efforts across all of our centers this year: days outstanding and percentage of accounts receivable over 90 days.
Q: In which area of your health system's revenue cycle are you most confident, or you feel you have made the most progress in?
MO: Over the past year, Regent has made great progress in net collections and process redesign. In terms of redesign, we have worked with billers to ensure that their revenue cycle processes are performing most efficiently both for the facility and for the outsourced RCM vendor. For one of our centers, which relied heavily on faxes and emails to get us patient billing information, we developed a cloud-based, HIPAA complaint drive that enabled us to make the patient information exchange process between us and the center totally seamless.
Q: What do you believe is the most important trait in a revenue cycle leader?
MO: One of the most critical assets is effective leadership skills. Being an effective revenue cycle leader is about meeting regularly with your management team, communicating effectively with your staff and then empowering your management team and employees to not only do the work they are given, but then to actively come up with effective change agents to improve revenue functions at every level.
If you would like to submit a candidate for Becker's "RCM leaders to know" series, please forward revenue cycle nominations to Brooke Murphy at bmurphy@beckershealthcare.com for consideration.