A hospital’s financial health depends largely on its revenue cycle operations. The more unpaid bills that sit in accounts receivable, the less money you have rolling in. That means more time and effort spent on collection, ever increasing debt, and a negatively impacted bottom line. For that reason, healthcare executives are taking notice.

Healthcare Finance talked to healthcare executives from top health organizations across the country and they shared their strategies to reduce their accounts’ days in accounts receivable.

NYU Langone Health

The revenue cycle operations team at NYU Langone Health has relied upon excellent communication to reduce accounts’ time in account receivables – communication within the organization, with insurance companies, and with patients. They have also:

• Implemented the use of a charge estimator tool to give patients their approximate out-of-pocket obligation ahead of time, reducing confusion and increasing the likelihood that they will pay
• Launched an initiative to keep the number of 30-day or older unbilled accounts as close to zero as possible, met weekly until targets were reached
• Developed reports and dashboards that showed unbilled account data broken down by payor, department, etc. to hold parties accountable and spot trends
• Designated a joint operating committee and analytics team (a “SWAT team”) to quickly resolve the most problematic accounts

NYC Health + Hospitals

Instead of each facility in the system monitoring its own data, NYC Health + Hospitals avoids tunnel vision and aggregates all 10 hospitals’ data into a system-wide dashboard, so that account directors at each hospital can compare their performance, identify trends and gaps, and readily learn lessons from better performing hospitals. This creates an environment of “healthy competition” where continual improvement is baked in.

• Brought on remote coders to eliminate the accounts receivable bottlenecks caused by high turnover
• Engaged with payors as a System rather than as individual hospitals to address denials

Dignity Health and Optum360

According to Dignity Health and Optum360, a significant reduction in unpaid bills in accounts receivable requires collaboration with leadership in all areas of the revenue cycle.

• Hastened the process of reducing aged revenue by targeting the top 11 contracted payers with the greatest number of billed accounts receivable in the previous 90 days
• Daily or weekly meetings held with payers and the business office to review accounts and provide additional information to move the process along as needed
• Improved financial clearance rate by targeting the main drivers of denials or rebills with automated workflows, dashboards, and increased training

The full interview can be found here.

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