Create performance indicators to quickly identify and stop revenue leakage.
Jim Lazarus, Managing Director of Strategy and Innovation, Revenue Cycle Solutions Division, The Advisory Board Company: For most hospitals, diagnosing documentation and coding problems is labor intensive and tedious, and ICD-10 has made it exponentially harder to pinpoint what creates the issue. So what can be done to make this process more sustainable for staff and impactful on the bottom line? You need to focus on preventing revenue leakage rather than analyzing root causes. You can achieve this by using technology to monitor documentation, coding and reimbursement performance in real time. With agreed-upon performance "tripwires," you can automatically notify proper staff members to take action when performance falls below a predetermined target and prevent problems from repeating.