Feb 5
2020
Understanding and Improving Patient Financial Clearance
By Samir Panchal, consultant, Freed Associates.
As industry economics change, health care organizations are increasingly being pressured to provide financial transparency while improving the patient experience. Patient financial clearance (PFC) departments are increasingly under pressure to reduce costs and improve their own performancemetrics.
Yet it is difficult to improve baseline PFC key metrics such as days outs, denials, patient escalations, and write-offs without adding staff, an additional expense.
How can PFC departments reasonably achieve performance and productivity goals while still fulfillingtheir core functions? The first step toward PFC improvement is to understand how most PFC departments work, then sequentially adding measures to enhance PFC performance.
Understanding PFC
PFC departments, usually operating within a provider’s revenue cycle division, are typically resource challenged to curtail internal costs. A PFC department’s greatest cost is staffing, since most authorizations require staff-conducted phone calls to payers. Furthermore, authorizations are often complex for PFC to obtain, since they are based on specific payer rules and valid for only a set period of time.
PFC staff are also responsible for communicating the status of the authorization to not only the patient but also clinic staff. Given that a PFC department’s most important metrics directly pertain to patient health, it is imperative that PFC’s work is done in a timely manner and that financial status and payment are explained clearly to both the patient and provider, so that both parties can be educated in their decision-making process.
The organizational structure of a PFC department can assist or impede its overall productivity, based on the PFC team’s technology, workflow, and communication. For example, keeping teams in siloes may make team members specialized in their work but it can also create difficulty in achieving a streamlined overall process, due to the number of handoffs required to complete simple takes. Factors such as these illustrate the need for PFC departments to emphasize continuous improvement and workflow “optimization” which aligns technology, people and processes.
Improving PFC Performance
PFC performance improvement starts with understanding the department’s technology limitations an exploring potential options to automate PFC functions. For example, technology to verify insurance and benefits should be considered to reduce manual intervention as well as optimizing work queues to improve performance. Most EHRs have integrated insurance verification tools which can be configured to maximize the organization’s payers.