“I would be lying to you if I said that we were prepared for that event,” Lynn Ansley, Moffitt’s vice president of revenue cycle management, told Becker’s. “We weren’t. It didn’t cross our minds that our clearinghouse would just completely go down with no timeline to bring it back up.”
But her team’s quick response to mitigate the effects of the outage was her proudest accomplishment of 2024.
“The reason it makes me so proud is because it was Moffittwide,” she said. “Everyone across this organization was leaning in to figure out how they could help. Because anyone who knows anything about revenue cycle, we are what some may call the ‘cash register’ of the hospital. So if you have shut down your cash register, what the impact then becomes is, ‘How are we going to pay our operational expenses to keep the lights on?'”
Ms. Ansley said her team had “no choice but to find other solutions and ways to get through this,” and they did.
“It took our mindset from ‘Well, as a rev cycle, we don’t have big projects that are going to start for fiscal 2025’ to ‘OK, we just got through this. There are three other things that we want to do in terms of big technology implementations. Let’s go.'”
The revenue cycle team’s response wasn’t just a win, she said, “It also created this snowball of momentum to do the big things and our organization got behind us.”
Ms. Ansley said Moffitt now performs downtime exercises and is ready, should a similar disruption strike.
“We know X, Y and Z is going to happen on day one and we already know that we can get through it without preparation. We can get through it even better with the preparation.”
