Revenue Cycle

Tip: Schedule monthly meetings with patient access team

Patient Financial Services Weekly Advisor, August 1, 2008

With 300 registrars at three acute-care hospitals in the CoxHealth system, it is not easy to point the blame at any one of them for a data-entry error.
 
So when the Springfield, MO-based health system began to see errors such as incorrect addresses and insurance plan codes pop up with more frequency, their revenue cycle team began to look at the entire process rather than to single out each individual.
 
A big part of that process began with facilitating monthly meetings between the patient financial services and patient access departments, which then revealed the first problem: the back end was simply correcting the errors of the front without telling them.
 
“We were making data entry errors that the front end didn’t know about because the back end was sitting there correcting them day after day,” says Brandon C. Horine, IT analyst/project management in admission services for CoxHealth. “We’ve now opened communication from the back end to the front end so that it’s done right the first time. It prevents any headaches patients might experience with their bill.”
 
CoxHealth began the monthly meetings in May 2008. It includes directors, managers, supervisors, education services, IT, registrars, and billers.
 
“It’s to kind of understand being in someone else’s shoes,” Horine says. “It’s understanding what others go through on a day-to-day basis.”
 
CoxHealth’s patient financial department is composed of 84 staff members (billers and other roles) and 10 managers.
 
Meeting up with the large patient access team has helped CoxHealth:
·        Improve quality for registration/billing purposes
·        Identify resolutions through continuing education and/or technology that it presently uses and/or implements
·        Establish a follow-up process to avoid a breakdown in pre-certification data entry into its billing system for one of our point of service areas
·        Remove a data entry field in its software system that created billing issues
·        Craft an educational newsletter that will be sent to all members of the centralized and decentralized registration areas and posted its Web site 
 
“Our first meeting went really well,” Horine says. “Everybody was really excited to meet each other. We always send e-mails back and forth, but now you can start relating with each other and become a big team. But you have to have structure. You don’t want to have open forum. And it’s good to have an action-item tracker.”
 
Editor’s note: The preceding is an excerpt from a story that will appear in an edition of Patient Access Advisor later this year.

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