For many healthcare leaders, the recent events at Change Healthcare transcend the headlines.
Physician practices, hospitals, health systems, and pharmacies – pillars of the care continuum – are still grappling with disrupted cash flow, delayed or deferred treatments, and compromised data. This incident not only exposes the vulnerabilities of individual care sites, but also the fragility of our global healthcare supply chain.
And I’m reminded that “Change” is just a singular event. As the adage goes, “the only constant in life is change” – so we must ask ourselves when will this happen again, not if, and what am I doing today to fortify my tech-enabled moat?
What are the processes, safeguards, and best practices that you can put in place to be viewed as a highly reliable organization (HRO), protected against potentially harmful, even nefarious external forces? Here are three steps that healthcare leaders can take today to establish financial and operational independence – their moat – through improved processes and tech-enabled solutions.
1. Ruthlessly assess your current workflow
Taking the time to thoroughly assess your “as-is” can help identify inefficiencies within your revenue cycle that may be contributing to leakages, increased denials, prolonged Accounts Receivable (AR) cycles, and other key indicators.
Document your workflow as it exists today and identify opportunities for improvement by looking for potential single points of failure – where your practice has an overreliance on human input, or processes, that may lead to a heightened risk exposure.
Through Ascent Health’s array of comprehensive process assessments and benchmarking, healthcare leaders can establish a 360-degree understanding of their revenue cycle and potential challenges and then make informed decisions on how to mitigate risks through improved processes and workflow. Assessment of your current workflow becomes critical in identifying and realizing improvements to become highly reliable.
In one recent engagement, Ascent increased cash flow for a leading vascular health provider by $12 million through the assessment and digitization of over 1,000 processes across major payers, reducing the need for human input and ensuring consistency across locations.
2. Future-proof your practice through people and process optimization
Our workforce landscape continues to evolve rapidly, only accelerated by seismic events like COVID and Change. For scale, nearly half of all U.S. healthcare workers are projected to leave their positions within the next year. Such impending turnover leaves healthcare leaders with the immense burden of quickly shoring up institutional knowledge gaps to ensure business continuity and high reliability.
“Healthcare leaders can no longer afford to rely solely on traditional processes in the face of constant change,” comments one revenue cycle leader. “We must embrace tech-enabled solutions to optimize both our people and processes to ensure we remain highly reliable for our customers and patients.”
Ascent supports leading organizations through extended office support to ensure practices have access to the right staffing resources at the right time, allowing them to focus on what matters most to their business. Whether facing sudden departures or grappling with prolonged recruitment cycles, Ascent deploys expert revenue cycle process staffing, call center, and project-based solutions that seamlessly integrate into workflow.
3. Increase flexibility and optionality through a strategic partnership
As you lead your organization through the ever-evolving, ever-challenging healthcare supply chain, consider adopting an option demand mindset by securing a strategic sourcing partnership with established, proven expertise.
We define “option demand” as the practice of ensuring access to resources when, where, and in what intensity needed, and to enable those resources in a hurry. We have established many partnerships with clients that want to mitigate single points of failure, diversify reliance on key (human) resources, and build mission-critical redundancy.
In certain competencies – revenue cycle management, coding and reimbursement, and payer relations to name a few – provider organizations may find it very difficult to identify, hire, and retain talent, and conclude that a partner with broader reach may be better suited to build the requisite competencies needed for success.
A strategic sourcing partner can add tremendously to any organization that strives to be highly reliable by offering on-demand access to expertise, processes, professional staff, and highly advanced systems and technology.
Ascent Health’s comprehensive SaaS platform, ARMS Ai, exemplifies the power of automation in revolutionizing RCM processes. By seamlessly integrating machine learning algorithms into existing workflows, ARMS Ai empowers practices to expedite authorization processes and other key processes to optimize operational workflows.
Through ARMS Ai, Ascent Health deployed a comprehensive digital strategy for one of the nation’s largest ambulatory infusion providers. With over 1,600 processes automated across 32 states, the organization significantly enhanced efficiency and minimized errors, resulting in a $28 million increase in cash flow and a 25% reduction in operating costs. The implementation of automated payment posting, streamlined claims status updates, and standardized appeals processes resulted in operational accuracy soaring above 95%.
Bill Stone
EVP - US Healthcare, Ascent Health