Avoiding Revenue Crunches During EMR Transitions

Most healthcare leaders know, well before their EMR rollouts, that clinical productivity and billings may fall for a while as the implementation proceeds. That being said, it seems a surprising number are caught off guard by the extent to which payments can be lost or delayed due to technical issues during the transition. This is particularly alarming as more and more hospitals are looking at switching EHR.

Far too often, those responsible for revenue cycle issues live in a silo that doesn’t communicate well with hospital IT leadership, and the results can be devastating financially. For example, consider the case of Maine Medical Center, which took a major loss after it launched its Epic EMR in 2012, due in part to substantial problems with billing for services.

But according to McKesson execs, there’s a few steps health systems and hospitals can take to reduce the impact this transition has in your revenue cycle. Their recommendations include the following:

  • Involve revenue cycle managers in your EMR migration. Doing so can help integrate RCM and EMR technologies successfully.
  • Create a revenue cycle EMR team. The team should include the CFO, revenue cycle leaders from patient access and reimbursement, vendor reps and someone familiar with revenue cycle systems. Once this team is assembled, establish a meeting schedule, team roles and goals for participants. It’s particularly important to designate a project manager for the revenue cycle portion of your EMR rollout.
  • Before the implementation, research how RCM processes will be affected by the by the rollout, particularly how the new EMR will impact claims management workflow, speed of payment and staff workloads. Check out how the implementation will affect processes such as eligibility verification, registration data quality assurance, preauthorization and medical necessity management, pre-claim editing and remittance management.
  • Pay close attention to key performance indicators throughout the transition. These include service-to-payment velocity, Days Not Final Billed, charge trends and denial rates.

The article also recommends bringing on consultants to help with the transition. Being that McKesson is a health IT vendor, I’m not at all surprised that this is the case. But there’s something to the idea nonetheless. Self-serving though such a recommendation may be, it may help to bring in a consultant who has an outside view of these issues and is not blinkered by departmental loyalties.

That being said, over the longer term healthcare leaders need to think about ways to help RCM and IT execs see eye to eye. It’s all well and good to create temporary teams to smooth the transition to EMR use. But my guess is that these teams will dissolve quickly once the worst of the rollout is over. After all, while IT and revenue cycle management departments have common interests, their jobs differ significantly.

The bottom line is that to avoid needless RCM issues, the IT department and revenue cycle leaders need to be aligned in their larger goals. This can be fostered by financial rewards, common performance goals, cultural expectations and more, but regardless of how it happens, these departments need to be interested in working together. However, unless rewards and expectations change, they have little incentive to do so. It’s about time hospital and health system leaders address problem directly.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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