Collecting cash is the most crucial step in the revenue cycle process for any healthcare organization. Although it sounds straightforward, for many organizations, how they collect payments and which personnel are collecting payments is effectively a black box. Prioritizing top-line revenue numbers without a comprehensive understanding of payment volumes and efficiencies at a more granular level will inevitably result in money left on the table.
As with any process improvement initiative, starting with the most foundational and specific data point, the payment itself, and analyzing each step in the payment collection chain will reveal efficiency opportunities. Visibility to payment volumes posted by individuals, positions, units, locations, and facilities allows for like comparisons across the organization at every level. These comparisons provide valuable baseline metrics to identify outliers, high performers, laggards, etc. and deliver the appropriate incentive structures to drive desired outcomes. Access to meaningful, actionable data at the payment level is a crucial determinant to the overall success of a payment improvement project. It allows for the establishment of baselines from which to assess the effectiveness of incentive programs, once initiated.
Beyond the internal and operational aspects of cash collection, understanding who your payers are and their payment methodology can also create opportunities for improvement. Payers respond to incentives just as willingly as employees, so identifying and incentivizing preferred transaction types and payment methods that lead to higher reimbursement can lead to improved cash collection. It all comes back to answering the following questions based on the quality of your data.
• Who is posting the most cash? (by person and by position)
• Which locations and facilities are posting the most cash?
• Which payment methods are posting the most cash?
• What are the most common transaction types, and how much cash are they posting?
If your organization lacks visibility into any of these areas, it’s a missed chance to improve cash collection. Softek Panther® software provides real-time access to this cash collections data, as well as many other crucial data points that may be difficult to uncover with Cerner® Patient Accounting reports alone.
What does Softek® do?
Softek’s mission is to help hospital systems get the most out of their investment in Cerner Millennium®. We do this by providing innovative software solutions and consulting services that can achieve more together than either can alone.
At Softek, our team of innovators and software developers brings expertise beyond the ordinary to every client. Our experts are involved with Cerner Millennium® hospitals throughout the country, consulting clients so they can optimize system performance and revenue integrity.
Softek delivers a full suite of consulting services and software solutions to assess and optimize EMR system performance, including revenue cycle integrity and patient accounting.
Softek was awarded 2021 Best in KLAS for Revenue Cycle Optimization.
Let’s talk to see how you can get the most out of your Cerner Millennium® system.
