Hospital and health system revenue cycle leaders must navigate today's reimbursement climate and changing expectations related to the patient financial experience.
Here, three leaders share their advice for the journey with Becker's:
1. Melissa Shore, vice president of revenue performance management at Boston-based Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: "The revenue cycle is really a team sport. Looking at the issues from a multidisciplinary view — which really means working with people outside of finance — is critical to success. And this especially includes caregivers and patients."
2. Gerard Brogan Jr., MD, senior vice president and chief revenue officer of New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health: "I think we have had some success the last few years by engaging with the clinical leadership and the medical staff and enhancing their appreciation of the value of an effective revenue cycle to their jobs and getting the cooperation necessary from the physician side or the advanced care providers to complement the effort of the revenue cycle staff."
3. Tina R. Strawn, RN, administrative director of operations for patient financial services at Houston-based Harris Health System: "One of the most successful things we've done when it comes to managing our accounts receivable (which is at 35.9 days or Epic's top fifth percentile) is to analyze payment variances created the previous day via two reports, a daily credit and a daily debit report. In both situations, identifying high volume variances by payer will allow leaders to understand where to focus their attention. Finding the root cause of those variances is critical to managing accounts receivables by focusing on payers with contract load issues, our own contract load issues and/or ineffective system actions. The reports will also provide to you a way to compile all of the cases impacted when it comes time for the payer to do a special project to reprocess the erroneously paid cases."
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