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Incentive plans: Give a little, get a lot back

Patient Access Weekly Advisor, July 25, 2007

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Teresa Bassett, the patient access director at Riverside Health System (RHS) in Newport News, VA, knew that the best way to make the organization's aggressive time-of-service (TOS) collections and registration quality initiatives fly was to get staff members excited about them.

So in October 2005, well before many of its peers thought to develop and implement an organized rewards program, RHS began challenging staff members to perform their registration duties more efficiently by giving them an incentive to be great at their jobs.

The results have been tremendous-RHS has seen increased TOS collections, fewer registration mistakes, and little staff turnover.

Certifications

First, Bassett set out to educate staff members about their importance to the financial well-being of the organization. All too often, registration staff members receive too much of the criticism and not enough of the praise, she says.

"I wanted our staff to understand how important they are. If they don't do the job well, we won't get paid timely or possibly at all," Bassett says. "I wanted to build their con-fidence and show that they are not just a registrar."

To further this goal, RHS began offering $500 bonuses for patient access staff members who passed the certified patient access associate exam.

RHS paid the exam fee the first time for each staff member who took the exam. Eighty percent of the system's patient access staff members took the exam, and 75% passed.

"Staff morale was dramatically increased," Bassett says.

Random gratitude

RHS has worked diligently to create an environment in which hard work is always noticed-and often rewarded.

"We have a manager's toolbox filled with movie passes, gift cards for our cafeteria, Starbucks gift certificates, and other gifts we can use to reward staff that go above and beyond," says Bassett. "We want to continue encouraging staff to work hard, and this is a great way to do so."

Incentives program

RHS also has a quarterly incentives program for up-front collections and registration accuracy.

For up-front collections, a staff member will receive a $100 bonus for collect-ing 70% or more of all of the TOS money due to the registrars for that quarter. If the staff member collects between more than 65%-69.9% of all the TOS money due to them for that quarter, he or she will receive a $50 bonus.

For registration accuracy, a staff member will receive a $100 bonus if he or she has an accuracy rate of 96% or higher for the quarter. The staff member will receive a $50 bonus for an accuracy rate of 91%-95.9%.

Those parameters may need to change soon as RHS registrars have gone from 65% accuracy to 98.7% during the past few years. "We originally had the top goal at 85% accurate, so I guess we'll probably have to raise the bar again," Bassett says.

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