PatientKeeper, an EHR optimization software company, is used by healthcare revenue cycle professionals to manage billing and charge aggregation. During a Nov. 18 webinar, "Electronic charge aggregation: The key to streamlining central billing office workflow," panelists discussed their experiences utilizing a charge aggregation solution and how it's helped them during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The discussion was moderated by Stella Deych-Hendrickson, product manager at PatientKeeper, and included three panelists:
Greg Dineen, project manager and senior systems analyst at Tufts Medical Center
Lydia Dollar, director of revenue integrity at Baystate Medical Practices
Elizabeth Lindsay, director of revenue cycle transition at HCA Parallon
Here are three excerpts from the discussion:
Note: Quotes have been edited for length and clarity.
1. The PatientKeeper charge aggregator tool helped Baystate Health organize paper tickets and files, and kept charge records from falling through the cracks, Dollar said.
"We had a file room that had boxes and boxes of charge tickets, and some providers would submit charge tickets that were three, four months old," she said. "They would find them in lab coats. They found them in their car. We needed to get our charges in one place where we could look to accurately see our revenue."
2. Mr. Dineen said he found the ability to create code edits in the PatientKeeper system to be especially useful.
"A lot of times charges would flow to downstream systems and then we would have to fix them there and chase doctors and charge entry clerks around," he said. "Now, we're able to clean charges in PatientKeeper — we can create any kind of custom code edits in there — so we're able to speed up the whole process."
3. Ms. Lindsay said PatientKeeper helped her provider organizations manage billing workflows when they implemented telehealth during the COVID-19 pandemic.
"For us, it was a huge priority effort to get telehealth billing in place," she said. "We did a lot of partnership with PatientKeeper as well as our divisions to make sure we could put rules in place … It was so critical to capture the telehealth activity occurring in a hospital setting."
View the full webinar here.