Revenue Cycle

Q: What are the responsibilities of an A/R task force, and who should be involved?

Patient Financial Services Weekly Advisor, October 1, 2004

A: Our A/R task force consists of the business office director, the patient registration supervisor, and the HIM director.

Several years ago, this team was created to reduce our A/R days from highs in the 80s to 60 at the most. We have currently been running at 48-53 days the last few months.

Once we reviewed all of our process and identified problem areas that were keeping us from reducing days and keeping them there, we added our director of quality improvement to the team so she could be the liaison between finance and clinical.

We created a work plan and have completed most of the goals. The work plan included items such as

  • hiring a full-time financial counselor
  • making our monthly patient account statements more user friendly (complete redesign)
  • purchasing a new electronic billing product
  • adding more staff in the HIM department
  • educating clinical staff and physicians on medical necessity and documentation
  • purchasing a new local medical review policy/medical necessity product to be used in clinical areas
  • creating universal chart order for inpatient charts
  • moving bad debt and uncollectable accounts to a collection agency in a more timely manner
  • establishing upfront emergency room collections
  • standardizing the paperwork flow throughout all departments
  • changing our policy and procedure with regard to our payment guidelines and educating the consumers

    We continue to meet weekly to tackle any problems that arise regarding the revenue cycle. Some of our current projects have been customizing our face sheet and label programs, patient flow throughout our construction project, HIPAA items, etc.

    We have found it worthwhile to meet weekly to review what's going on in each department and go over new problem areas.

    This question was answered by Laurie Gaffney, director of the business office, Buena Vista Regional Medical Center, Storm Lake, IA.

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