Improving the patient financial experience and mitigating reimbursement risk can be achieved through standardizing processes within the revenue cycle department.
Jill Buathier, vice president and health system chief revenue cycle officer at Palo Alto, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care, shared with Becker's Hospital Review how Stanford Health Care is moving from disparate revenue cycle operations toward a unified process.
"Where we're at right now is we have one separate revenue cycle organization for each entity. Each is operating independently with its own management team and infrastructure. This resulted in variation, duplication and redundancies leading to inconsistent patient financial experience, various onboarding and training plans, repetitive and/or inefficient processes, different IT solutions and third-party vendors and various rates negotiated for third-party vendors and outsourcing."
She said Stanford Health Care is addressing this variation through a "revenue cycle consolidation among three entities — Pleasanton, Calif.-based Stanford Health Care – ValleyCare, Stanford Health Care and University HealthCare Alliance, the medical foundation of Stanford Health Care and Stanford Medicine.
"We want to achieve that single voice for the revenue cycle organization, standardizing processes and systems, and transform revenue cycle from an operational process into a strategic asset that improves the patient financial experience and mitigates reimbursement risk."
If you would like to share your RCM best practices, please email Kelly Gooch at kgooch@beckershealthcare.com to be featured in the "RCM tip of the day" series.
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