From Epic revenue cycle implementations to enhanced recruitment and retention efforts, here is what three revenue cycle leaders told Becker's about their biggest completed projects and initiatives this year:
Tracy Berry. Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer at BJC HealthCare (St. Louis): Completing our Epic revenue cycle implementations. We just finished those in September. We started this journey with two community hospitals back in June of 2021. So we transitioned them to Epic rev cycle and then we had our three academic hospitals [transition] in April and now our final hospitals in September, so it's nice to have everyone on one platform and to have those go-lives behind us … We elected to do three waves and we could learn from each wave. We got better at it each time. We started with those two community hospitals. That went well, but certainly there were lessons learned of how we could do even better next time and even better the third time. Our third implementation was incredibly smooth.
Lisa Schillaci. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Operations at Houston Methodist: We just completed an automated authorization pilot for certain radiology authorizations. The pilot was successful and the results continue to improve. The project has gained excitement and momentum to rapidly deploy across the enterprise. The outcome of this project will reduce manual work for our staff and increase patient satisfaction by having procedures secured more timely.
Lauren Vessie. Director of Patient Access at Renown Health (Reno, Nev.): Patient access at Renown has significantly focused on our recruiting and retention efforts in this last year and has experienced extreme progress in this area. The total open positions we have at any given time has significantly decreased, which has resulted in a positive impact on our retention rates and our team's overall engagement. We have seen less turnover throughout our team due to burnout and more turnover due to positive progression for our teams, such as promotional and/or growth opportunities. Within our leadership team, in patient access and across revenue cycle as a whole, we have had many positions open due to promotion. All of these open positions have been backfilled with current team members promoting. For example, we had a manager of patient access promoted. Her position was backfilled with a supervisor promoting, whose position was backfilled with a senior representative promoting. This has been extremely rewarding for our team as it shows that our efforts of developing our team and our focus on growing team members skills has really paid off. Our hope for the next year is to continue to work on growth and development of our entire team in order to continually decrease turnover and increase engagement.