A Mississippi health system and three hospitals in Texas, Indiana and Alabama are illustrating how hospitals can thrive, even in a tough economic environment. One hospital increased its revenue by $8.2 million after improving clinical documentation. Another changed the way it collected for services and boosted revenue by $6.1. million.
The four facilities are clients of The Advisory Board Company, a global technology, research and consulting firm based in Washington, D.C. The firm presented each facility with a 2014 Revenue Cycle Solutions Award for their accomplishments. The awards, in their second year, were given Aug. 21 at the Revenue Cycle Summit in Washington, D.C.
The awards recognize the institutions' leadership in initiatives to improve financial sustainability and achieve significant financial performance improvements.
Other hospitals across the country working to maintain sustainability can relate to these hospitals, said Pete Simpkinson, senior director, strategic marketing at The Advisory Board Company, in an email statement. "They aren't the names that are always in the media, and they operate in states that don't plan to expand Medicaid under the ACA."
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However, Simpkinson added, "the best practices in these hospitals' case studies are highly transferrable via multidisciplinary initiatives and approaches to analytics that improved clinical documentation and increased point-of-service revenue capture."
Receiving awards are:
- Baptist Beaumont Hospital, a 325-bed hospital in Beaumont, Texas, and a member of Baptist Hospitals of Southeast Texas, had achieved only limited physician support for the hospital's clinical documentation improvement program. The limited support constrained the program's effectiveness. Through a focused initiative, the hospital pinpointed the biggest opportunities to improve coding and documentation performance and conducted individualized education with the underperforming physicians. Beaumont also redesigned core CDI processes to increase efficiency and strengthen staff interactions with physicians. As a result of improved coding accuracy, the hospital was able to receive incremental payments totaling $8.2 million for delivered services in the first 12 months.
- Mississippi Baptist Medical Center, a 628-bed hospital in Jackson, Miss., and a division of Baptist Health Systems, saw in its preparation for the rollout of the new ICD-10 coding system that the hospital also had an opportunity to improve clinical documentation under the current ICD-9 coding system. The health system structured CDI training that covered both ICD-9 and ICD-10 at the same time. Doing so enabled the hospital to drive compliance and save significant staff time.
- IU Health Goshen Hospital, a 122-bed hospital in Goshen, Ind., was facing a rise in uninsured admissions and patient out-of-pocket obligations. The hospital provided patients greater transparency into patient obligation at the onset of care, in part by implementing a presumptive charity policy, which reviewed every patient household for charity eligibility. The solution reduced bad debt, increased community benefit, and improved the efficiency of the patient billing process.
- Springhill Medical Center, a 252-bed hospital in Mobile, Ala., had a large number of patients discharged without their final bill because the hospital struggled with evaluating patient payment responsibility to calculate accurate bill estimates. The facility launched an initiative across many departments to improve financial performance and link all the revenue cycle components to one database so frontline staff could see patient responsibility, payment history, and charity eligibility at the onset of care. Springhill also enabled online bill payment to increase the efficiency of accounts receivable. Through these initiatives, Springhill increased point-of-service collection by a cumulative $6.1 million over the past four years and decreased DNFB – discharged not final billed – from a high of 9.3 percent to an average of 5.73 percent.
"As hospitals and health systems increasingly face margin pressures from accountable payment contracts and price-sensitive markets, the value of a high-performance revenue cycle has become even more critical," said Zac Stillerman, general manager, revenue cycle solutions at The Advisory Board Company, in a news release. "The Revenue Cycle Solutions Awards winners have risen to national leadership in improving financial sustainability through analytics-driven approaches that prioritize staff engagement and education."
Detailed case studies are available here.
A free Web conference, The Keys to Successful Risk-Based Contracting, with The Advisory Board Company's experts is set for Monday, Sept. 8 at 11 a.m. Eastern Time.
