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Tip: Setting up an incentive program

Patient Access Weekly Advisor, March 12, 2008

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Marilyn Lipka, vice president of Wolfskill & Associates, a national healthcare revenue cycle consulting firm in Ohio, provides some guidelines on how to begin the development of an incentive program for your department. She says to first define what your program will be and what you want it to achieve. Some of the questions to answer in determining your program are:

Who will be included?

Will it be only staff members in a centralized area, or will it include registration staff members in specific departments?

What will be audited, and how will the auditing be accomplished?

What will you use as your quality and productivity standards?

When and what incentive payouts will you set up?

What external software will you need for tracking and auditing information?

You should also determine your audit sample size. "The industry basically says, 'If you want to reach a 95% competence [level] . . . you need to review about 5%. If you want to get to 99%, you need to review about 10% of registrations,' " she says.

After you've defined your program and what you want to accomplish, you will need to explain to administration why you think an incentive program is important for patient registration and present a cost-benefit analysis to them.

"The goal is to ultimately reduce costs and make the program pay for itself by reducing costs . . . You want the incentive program to be self-funding," Lipka says. Once you obtain approval, make sure you write down your program's specific policies and procedures and walk your staff members through them. They should fully understand the expectations that have been set for them.

To read the full story on this topic, click here.

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