We just got back from sunny San Diego, where we were honored to co-host the Collaboration of Revenue Cycle Epic Users (CORE www.coreusersgroup.org) conference. CORE is a conference led by users of Epic’s revenue cycle applications, providing both end users and analysts opportunities to network and to share best practices. In this post, we’ll highlight the topics with the most emphasis this year. In our next post about CORE, we’ll dig more in to how we approach these challenges with some of our customers.
Lots of organizations are working to prevent denials. For example, Rady Children’s Hospital presented on their success in addressing denials through improved communication across registration, coding, and billing departments. They also highlighted some innovative system automation to let the system, rather than a person, take the first step to follow up on denial codes. SCL Health shared work they’ve been doing through a self-service denials management application utilizing Tableau. They preached the gospel of self-service reporting and allowing individual departments access to drill into denial information they needed to prevent and manage those denials.
Revenue integrity departments, or teams that ensure charges are complete and accurate, are popping up everywhere. While each organization has a slightly different take on the role of these teams, the benefits are consistent – by auditing encounters for charge accuracy, you may find you’ve missed charges that you could be capturing more accurately. Based on what we heard, here are a few best practices in the design of a revenue integrity team:
At the end, we hosted a happy hour. Our team had a great time talking to some very intelligent revenue cycle minds and unwinding after a productive and informative week.
Stay tuned for more details on how we approach denial management and revenue integrity in our next post! Can’t wait? Email me at michael.behrens@prominenceadvisors.com