Traditional business goals like increasing revenue and ensuring compliance are long-standing, important objectives for hospitals.
But today, healthcare providers are increasingly viewing patient-centric goals as paramount to driving business outcomes — and to improving revenue cycle management.
During Becker's Hospital Review's 7th Annual Health IT + Digital Health + RCM Annual Meeting, in a roundtable sponsored by Change Healthcare, Patrick Drewry, who heads patient engagement for Change Healthcare, shared insights from the company's recent provider survey on patient experience and business goals.
Four key takeaways were:
1. Patient-centric goals are a top priority for healthcare professionals. While traditional business goals like increasing revenue and ensuring regulatory compliance are always important, healthcare professionals today point specifically to patient-centric goals as being most critical to driving business outcomes. In Change Healthcare's recent survey of 260 healthcare professionals, respondents indicated that three patient-focused organizational goals outranked 12 others in best reflecting their organizations' top priorities. These three goals are:
- Improve patient-provider communication and engagement
- Improve patient experience and satisfaction
- Improve patient access experience
"It's very top of mind to continue to transform revenue cycle to be more patient centric," Mr. Drewry said. "Really important in making things more patient centric is the idea of a relationship with the patient. And healthcare, the way we operate today, is not relationship focused. It is often transactional."
2. Many health system leaders say administrative and clinical patient experiences are not coordinated. Despite the desire to transform the patient experience — 87 percent of respondents said personalized communications are important to good revenue cycle management — clinical and financial messaging are rarely coordinated. And 92 percent of survey respondents said they face challenges in making revenue cycle management more patient centric.
3. RCM has the potential to be more fully automated, but most organizations are far behind. Automation can help streamline processes, easing the pain of staffing shortages, improving the patient experience and boosting the revenue cycle. However, despite 84 percent of healthcare providers saying it's important that RCM is automated, most organizations lack automated tools.
Mr. Drewry pointed out that automation doesn't have to be a technology play. "It can be, how do you make things self-service and get patients to do things?" he said. A participant commented that while consumers have come to expect self-service when ordering a rideshare, shopping or a number of other things, healthcare isn't there yet. "In healthcare, we're still comfortable letting our patients complete the same forms, even if they come back day after day," she said. "I work in a cancer center. For a three-week course of chemotherapy, where they come in every day, we're asking them to update the same form every day. It's horrible."
4. Focus on quick wins to move toward a patient-centric revenue cycle. In addition to self-service, other ideas for quick, relatively easy wins include making bills easier to understand. The average person may not understand terminology, or what their options might be, leading to collection issues. "Transparency in pricing is critical," another participant said, adding that self-pay options can help quicken time to pay. Mr. Drewry agreed, noting that educating patients about their obligations at the right time is important.
The road to patient-centric revenue cycle management is a long one, but health systems are increasingly recognizing that being patient centric is critical to financial success, is better for the patient experience and carries benefits like helping with staffing shortage issues.