As more and more providers are aligning themselves with hospitals, in either employment or other semi-employment arrangements, The accounts receivables that come with these providers often are but a drop in the bucket to the hospitals that employ them.
I was recently talking to a frustrated consultant who was working with a large facility in the northeast. The hospital last year made $350 million dollars.......the providers accounts receivables was running about $5.5 million. So of course the provider AR received little or no attention resulting in a growing AR, frustrated patients and growing cost to maintain the AR.
Hospitals are finding that as they acquire providers and their AR, migration over to the hospital EHR and combining accounts receivables under a single tax ID is presenting challenges and cost to those entities. The cost of software, the training, the inattention to details needed to make the provider AR successful might seem almost more trouble than it's worth.....literally.
So why should hospitals pay attention to provider AR?
- Data integrity - if the provider data isn't accurate and complete, how will that eventually impact the EHR? Duplicates of patients and patient data will ultimately result in duplicate patient records. While the real cost of that may not be immediately known, not only will records be duplicated, they will be incomplete which will ultimately lead to potential medical error. And it isn't rocket science to figure out the cost of medical error.
- Patient Satisfaction - when provider services are not billed appropriately, it requires not only clean up on the AR side, but also dealing with patients who know through EOBs that the bills are not right. Most patients do not like hanging balances without resolution and a real part of patient satisfaction is getting their bills correct and accurate the first time. In this age of competition for patients, the accurate working of AR could mean the difference between keeping a satisfied patient or losing that patient to an entity that can and does get it right.
- It pays for itself when done right - Provider AR is complex. There is no disputing that fact and will become more complex as Insurance Exchanges become realized and patients have the ability to shop for plans that best suit their medical needs. Spending the time and energy to get it right now, will result in revenue. Now maybe that revenue isn't the size of hospital revenue, but it's revenue all the same. Leveraging technology to work AR more efficiently will become the mechanism to positive cash flow.
There are of course other reasons why a hospital should invest it's resources (or perhaps hire outside resources that understand provider AR) but the bottom line is the bottom line. Failure to pay attention to the bottom line will result in financial chaos, patient loss and corruption of data.......aren't these 3 reasons alone enough reason?
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