In a recent press release, Alpha Health, the first Unified Automation™ company for revenue cycle management in healthcare, released results of a national survey designed to assess adoption of automation in revenue cycle operations at health systems and hospitals across the U.S. Results demonstrate that the increasing focus on digital transformation efforts in healthcare has driven the adoption of automation to help manage claims, billing and reimbursement processes.
The majority of health systems and hospitals, (more than 66 percent) say they are now using or implementing automation in their revenue cycle operations.
The survey was commissioned by Alpha Health and conducted through the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s (HFMA) Pulse Survey program. The survey was fielded between May 19, 2020 and June 22, 2020 among 587 chief financial officers and revenue cycle leaders at hospitals and health systems across the United States. The survey has a confidence level of 95 percent with a margin of error of plus or minus 5 percent.
“Automation in the healthcare revenue cycle is no longer an aspirational element of digital transformation efforts — it has become standard practice for the majority of health systems and hospitals,” said Malinka Walaliyadde, co-.founder and CEO of Alpha Health. “COVID-19 has placed many healthcare organizations under intense cash-flow pressure and created volatile claim volumes and workloads for revenue cycle teams. These dynamics are driving more revenue cycle leaders to look to automation to provide flexibility and resiliency in their operations while minimizing their organization’s cost to collect.”
According to the survey, health systems (versus hospitals) are statistically more likely to be currently using or implementing automation tools in their revenue cycle operations. Survey results also show that as the size of the organization increases so does their use of automation tools with the largest healthcare providers, those with $1B – $10B net patient revenues, most actively using or implementing these tools.