Electronic Health Reporter

By Shawn Yates, director of product management, Ontario Systems.

Impossible projects, crazy deadlines and short staffing present a bigger challenge than their own resolution: They draw focus away from important revenue cycle functions that maintain positive margins. Caring for the patient is, of course, the healthcare provider’s core mission. Healthcare’s financial operations help to achieve that mission.

Those involved in the revenue cycle process grasp the value efficiency and agent productivity can bring to an organization.

Reduced cost, greater performance, and the capacity to work through more patient accounts are the direct benefit, and those goals tie directly to financial performance and the core mission of outstanding patient care. Workflow, data analytics, reporting and performance dashboards are just a few of the tools you use to get to that point.

When working with new technology, having a resource to leverage from an outsourcing perspective can be very beneficial. Providers who outsource do so because they know their health system functions more efficiently when they can focus on what they do best.

What are the specific reasons that make outsourcing a particularly attractive investment right now? Three factors contribute:

1. It’s difficult to stay up-to-date on today’s technology. Whether it’s a smart phone, a smart appliance, or a smart digital assistant like Alexa, new features critical to your process come and go at a rapid pace. Leveraging technology outsourcing resources helps healthcare providers digest this information easier and implement solutions faster.
2. Siloed information means common, effective practices are shared less freely. Mergers, acquisitions, and other forms of consolidation make it difficult to reconcile the most effective practices that different parts of a health system use. A good managed services team focused on your technology can bring all that information together, which means more harmonious operation not only within your team, but in concert with others.
3. Increasing productivity is the key to financial success. Fully-leveraging new technology can be the key to managing talent, setting goals, and ultimately improving productivity, while using expert resources in a technology outsourcing capacity can help you bring in new features quicker. Together, these practices lead to faster returns on investment as providers today are faced with reduced reimbursements.

What’s the best way to go about identifying a need for technology outsourcing that works? Start by assessing core competency, scale and risk. These important criteria will help determine where outsourcing can best move a health system forward, and sharpen productivity. By recognizing different processes, opportunities for automation, and disparate data, teams can improve their financial performance and patient care.

Productivity improvements in healthcare revenue cycle management come through a combination of strategy and technology. This mix should promote industry best practices through automated workflow that maintains intellectual property and administers your policies and business rules. The ideal system works to move accounts seamlessly through their lifecycle, while escalating those that sit stagnant to prevent them from falling through the cracks altogether. Achieve these lofty operational goals, and you’ll see significant gains on the other side.

Start by getting in touch with technology partners and update learn the latest features your healthcare systems might not be using, or using to best effect. Then, identify those opportunities that fit best into the operations supporting your core mission, and bring technology outsourcing on board to keep focus on patient care.