Blessing Hospital leaders share what they learned from transforming the hospital's revenue cycle.
In 2010, however, the hospital took action to change that. Through a partnership with software company Allscripts, Blessing kicked off a two-year transformation process to install tools and technology that ultimately improved its revenue cycle management processes by automating tasks and integrating clinical and financial data.
The changes included prepopulating registration data and creating alerts to make registration more accurate, implementing messaging features to facilitate better communication between departments and installing a document imaging solution that completed the electronic health record and alloweds physicians to sign charts from their offices rather than having to physically visit the health information management offices.
The new system went live in October 2012, and as of this September, Blessing had experienced a 23 percent decrease in gross accounts receivable days, a 30 percent increase in clean claim rate and a 32 percent decrease in days not final billed. Because of these results, Blessing received a 2013 Allscripts Client Award.
Ms. Wolfmeyer and Julie Duke, administrative director of the hospital's revenue cycle, share how they revamped Blessing's financial processes and what they learned from the project.
1. Review current processes to identify opportunities for improvement. After the hospital decided to transform its revenue cycle management, the first step was spending six to nine months evaluating the processes in place, spending time with the people involved and gaining an understanding of what was working and what wasn't, Ms. Wolfmeyer says.
The hospital also formed a multidisciplinary design committee to evaluate the situation. "HIM, compliance, care management…everybody had an opportunity to bring their viewpoint to the table," she says. "It was very good to have that collaboration because departments learned a lot about each other."
2. Test and train thoroughly. After the evaluation phase, the new system's implementation involved "major testing," says Ms. Duke. This included a mock activation, and every staff member who would use the new system received classroom training.
"We tested and tested the system to make sure we weren't prone to any errors," she says.
3. Involve the right people, and communicate effectively with them. When embarking on a project like this, it's crucial for hospitals and health systems to know who the "stakeholders" are and to make sure they have a say in the implementation, Ms. Duke says.
"Installing a new revenue cycle application affects a lot of people in the organization," she says. "We met with a variety of individuals on the finance side, the clinical side, and even the physicians, the provider side, to make sure we weren't impacting their work and what their outcomes are."
The interdepartmental design team helped ensure the people whose work could be affected had a voice, she says. Furthermore, communicating adequately with everyone involved aided the project team in overcoming problems the hospital encountered during the implementation.
"A lot of times flags were thrown when someone wasn't involved and didn't understand how their role would change," she says. "We would have to work through that with them and make they understood what their role was going to be. Communication is definitely a key in any large implementation that you do."
4. Take some time to contemplate the project takeaways. After completing a project such as the revenue cycle overhaul,
"Every implementation we go through, we sit down and do a 'lessons learned,'" she says. "We talk about what went well. We have a repository of what we want to make sure we do again and what we can do better."
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