Intermountain Health’s Peaks Region (formerly Broomfield, Colo.-based SCL Health) is a regular winner of the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s MAP Award and Kodiak Solutions’ Top Performing Revenue Cycle Award, but that success wasn’t always a given.
“We were getting regular benchmarking data from Kodiak, and we were not high-performing,” Troy Spring, Salt Lake City-based Intermountain’s enterprise vice president of revenue cycle told Becker’s. Mr. Spring had served as SCL Health’s vice president of revenue cycle since 2015 before taking on his current role following the systems’ merger in 2022.
“In fact, we were middle of the path, lower end of the spectrum. And, you know, I was kind of tired of it. And our team was kind of tired of it. We used it as kind of a rallying cry to say ‘you know, our customers, our patients deserve better. They deserve excellence in revenue cycle.'”
The revenue cycle department set aggressive targets and built a structure around how to get there. Mr. Spring said they had strong buy-in from executive leadership to provide the resources and help to get there. They also had a strong commitment from the IT team.
Within the revenue cycle department, not many jobs are patient-facing, but they’ve emphasized that they are all caregivers and play an important role in the patient experience.
“The big thing that we hardwired was really the work that we do and the impact that it has on the patient,” he said. “So while a role may not be directly touching, when they’re working on an account, they are still touching a patient and the impact on that patient is huge.”
Mr. Spring said they have high employee engagement scores and think that is tightly tied to the work that they do.
“We have developed a year-long program to help with our rising supervisors, to help them learn how to be good leaders,” he said. “I think that is a big factor too. Probably what drives all of us with our job satisfaction is our boss. If you like your boss, then you’re going to be happy and you’re going to be productive and achieve results.”
The department also reviews its metrics regularly by interrogating them to discover what is or isn’t working, and asking what’s holding the team back from achieving a high performance.
Mr. Spring’s definition of a high-performing revenue cycle centers around the patient, ensuring that the process is frictionless for them, keeping the “sausage making” behind the curtain and limiting surprises.
The second part of his definition involves “driving excellent results for our customers.”
“Margins are razor-thin, and ensuring that we squeeze every ounce of juice out of that orange as we can is really critical for us.”
Getting every dollar they can out of the revenue cycle could mean the difference between expanding a hospital wing or hiring additional nurses, he said.
