With Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Medicine continuing to expand its footprint across West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Maryland, its revenue cycle leader is focused on a single, repeatable process to keep the 25-hospital system aligned.
Bahar Bazmi, who joined WVU Medicine as chief revenue cycle officer in late April, told Becker’s “CFO+Revenue Cycle Podcast” that consistency is key to keeping the system’s expansion on track.
“We really want to make sure that what we do is repeatable and sustainable, and that sustainability continues through every acquisition, every hospital we build and every piece of growth that we experience here,” she said. “For us, we can do a little bit of rinse-and-repeat as we continue to grow.”
Ms. Bazmi has been in healthcare for 30 years. Her roles at large health systems have spanned finance, IT and revenue cycle.
In her first five months at WVU Medicine, Ms. Bazmi said her first job was to listen and understand where the health system’s revenue cycle stood. She then began building a plan around three key areas.
- Optimizing revenue cycle end-to-end workflows. WVU Medicine is eliminating redundancies while partnering with providers to work more closely on clinical documentation. “Revenue cycle is not just a billing shop,” she said.
- Accelerating automation and technology. She plans to dive deeper into Epic functionalities and other existing platform partnerships.
- Improving WVU Medicine’s patient financial experience. The team is clarifying out-of-pocket estimates before and at the time of service. “Patients don’t separate their clinical care from their financial care,” she said. “For them, it’s one experience.”
Ms. Bazmi compared the patient experience to a sandwich, with clinical care as WVU Medicine’s meat, and revenue cycle registration and billing on either end as the bread.
“If we don’t get those two pieces right, and we don’t share that information early and often, we can really leave a bad taste in [patients’] mouth. Our goal is to really be a complement to the meat of what WVU Medicine does, which is healthcare,” she said.
On the topic of AI, Ms. Bazmi said the most immediate impact is not replacing people, but removing low-value manual work. She described AI as a tool for their team to make sure they can focus on high-skilled work that they need to do daily, letting AI surface exceptions and opportunities so staff can work at the top of their capabilities.
“We’re really excited about our AI opportunities,” she said. “This is not a set it and forget it. AI is not something you can just turn on like a light switch and trust that it works. You need to validate, you need to verify, you need to fine tune, and make sure that the results it’s yielding are accurate. To me, it’s a great tool. I think it’s going to really help our team.”
