Whitepapers & E-Books

As financial and regulatory pressures intensify, large health systems are looking for ways to reduce costs and optimize the revenue cycle. But for many providers, accounts-receivable operations are costly and chronically underperforming. Often times, EHR and technology platforms lack the very tools needed to address the problem.

This whitepaper explains:

• Two big revenue drains every provider must address
• The final barrier to RCM optimization
• How to fill your "EHR platform gap" and start building an accountable collections team in one simple step

Prior to the health and economic crises created by COVID-19, many of America's hospitals were struggling to navigate a difficult financial environment, due in part to declining reimbursement and increasing patient financial responsibility.

In a survey of more than 130 hospital leaders conducted by Becker's in conjunction with Zotec Partners in January 2020, respondents were asked to rank the influence of seven different challenges on their organization's financial performance on a scale of 1 to 10. Patient financial responsibility received the highest weighted score. While this survey predates the surge of COVID-19 cases in the U.S., concern among hospital leaders about patients' ability to pay their medical bills has likely intensified as the nation contends with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.

This white paper offers analysis of the survey results and offers insights into delivering patients an empathic financial experience.

A comprehensive revenue cycle management solution is necessary for all healthcare organizations to survive, recover and protect themselves from losing millions of dollars from unforeseeable events such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Even with federal relief funding, losses are only offset by 30 percent to 50 percent at larger hospitals. The C-suite of healthcare organizations have growing concerns ranging from revenue and margin pressure to increased revenue cycle complexities.

By utilizing iMedX’s comprehensive RCM solution, healthcare organizations will achieve a resilient revenue cycle through flexible staffing, accurate documentation, integrated technology, powerful analytics and visibility into payer contracts.

This whitepaper offers an overview of the challenges most affecting healthcare providers and details five keys for successful revenue cycle management:

• Flexible RCM staffing
• Accurate coding & documentation that includes telehealth
• Efficient, integrated technology
• Effective analytics
• Actionable visibility into payer contracts

Healthcare's cost crisis is putting the squeeze on patients and providers alike. In recent years, as the cost of care delivery has risen, reimbursements for health systems have declined and patients' out-of-pocket obligations have increased.

The COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated these challenges. Hospital financial leaders will have to find new ways to help their organizations weather this storm, and the patient financial experience will remain among their primary concerns.

This ebook provides an overview of some of healthcare's most enduring challenges and offers insights for healthcare leaders working to transform the patient financial experience.

When it comes to managing risk for today’s healthcare organizations, billing compliance and revenue cycle professionals face a common set of challenges: missed charges, over- or under-reported units, duplicate claims, over- or under-coding, and other issues. Combining forces to address these challenges not only ensures better outcomes, it also reduces the cost of auditing and risk management.

This white paper explains how combining the efforts of both groups under a “revenue integrity” umbrella enables organizations to align resources to pursue common goals such as a more robust revenue stream, decreased compliance risk, and enhanced bottom line performance.

What you’ll learn:

• Today’s landscape: how healthcare organizations are coping with ongoing changes to regulatory and reimbursement requirements, and the associated risks
• Billing Compliance and Revenue Cycle oversight: two sides of the risk equation
• How to leverage analytics to manage compliance risk and optimize revenue
• How aligning your billing compliance and revenue cycle resources can strengthen overall revenue integrity

During the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, telehealth became a lifeline for patients and providers. In some cases, implementing virtual care tools quickly made for a messy process.
But now, healthcare systems should reevaluate their digital strategies to ensure telehealth is part of a wide-open virtual front door that not only delivers care in a way that patients expect, but works as a revenue multiplier as well.

Download this report to learn:

• How to ensure everyone who wants to can access your services online
• How to move beyond seeing telehealth as a digital substitute and using it as a way to create digital transformation
• How an automated care-delivery platform can complement all of your care offerings to make them revenue multipliers

Discover how healthcare organizations are adopting new technology to improve care coordination and patient outcomes. This e-book addresses five of the biggest opportunities to improve healthcare delivery and examines how providers are using secure digital tools to connect patients, providers, and health insurers.

Read the e-book to learn about:

• Delivering better care in the face of constrained budgets and complex systems.
• Improving public health outcomes for communities.
• Supporting care teams to flag performance concerns proactively.
• Empowering providers to deliver connected and patient-centered care.
• Communicating using enterprise-grade security to stay compliant.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put the spotlight on telemedicine. With healthcare organizations moving to expedite the launch and expansion of telehealth and virtual services, quick fixes to process hiccups can be especially attractive. However, these quick solutions will not help organizations achieve long-term success. Hospital leaders have to act swiftly, but they should do so with foresight and care.

Download this guide for a complete list of the things you need to do to make telemedicine work.

Data analytics are increasingly used by hospitals and health systems to bring healthcare's enormous datasets into focus. While the technology has broad applications in healthcare — from tracking patient outcomes to monitoring pharmacy performance — many hospitals and health systems have been slow to integrate data analytics solutions. Barriers include the input of flawed data, a lack of executive buy-in, growing concerns over patient data privacy and ownership, and ineffective solutions that fail to serve the end user.

This E-book contains 10 articles that describe not only the many potential advantages of data analytics in healthcare, but also best practices for selecting and deploying an analytics solution. As several health IT experts agreed in one article, "The potential of using analytics to improve efficiency and outcomes is limited only by physician creativity."

Technology innovations have long held the promise of solving some of healthcare's most intractable problems. However, in previous iterations, some technology advancements weren't entirely user friendly. Today, emerging health IT solutions put the human experience front and center to improve healthcare for both providers and patients.

From key priorities for healthcare CIOs to insights on digital integration, this ebook features must-read articles for healthcare leaders focused on innovation.

The value of virtual care has never been clearer. Hospitals across the country and globally have expanded the use of telehealth to address capacity issues system-wide.

Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, telehealth was gaining favor among health care providers. This e-book details the successes of two leading health systems' efforts to expand virtual care programs into non-acute service lines. At this moment, we don't know what healthcare's "new normal" will be once the pandemic subsides. But it is safe to say telehealth will continue to play an important role in the future of care delivery.

Reliable data can be hard to come by, but it’s imperative to driving healthcare forward — especially in these trying times. Being able to quickly determine quality data can lead to actionable insights and optimized recoveries.

Download our quick guide to better understand the importance of:

• Identifying accurate data sources
• Gathering information in a meaningful way
• Prioritizing internal and external collaboration efforts
• Using insights to enhance patient outcomes and influence profitability

Physician burnout can lead to medical errors and affect patient safety, provider attrition, health system economics and more.

But Suki, an AI-powered clinical digital assistant, can help physicians save time on documentation and other administrative tasks, which are major contributors to burnout.

Organizations that use Suki have:

• Increased revenue through higher encounter volumes
• Reduced claims denial rates due to high quality documentation
• An analysis quantifying physician satisfaction and impact on organizational economics as a result of using Suki is available in a short report.

When surgical care is delivered in the ASC, both payers and patients win. Surgery patients tend to have better experiences when treated in an ASC, and the price tag on these procedures is generally lower than it would be if performed in a hospital. The bottom line: payers reimburse less for procedures in the ASC, and patients have higher satisfaction with the care experience.

However, as ASCs deliver care at a lower cost, it's important for these organizations to ensure bills are accurate and that claims go out clean and garner fair, timely reimbursement. Payer reimbursement for medical procedures is highly dependent on detailed clinical documentation. The list of possible Current Procedural Technology (CPT) variations can appear endless, even for a single type of operation.

During an executive roundtable at Becker's ASC Review 26th Annual Meeting: The Business and Operations of ASCs in Chicago in October, two Nuance CMIOs and the CEO of Greensboro (N.C.) Specialty Surgical Center, discussed how ASCs can enhance documentation workflow, increase the specificity of clinical documentation and optimize the billing cycle. This whitepaper is based on that conversation.

The drive towards greater penetration of machine learning in healthcare is being accompanied by increased calls for machine learning and AI based systems to be regulated and held accountable in healthcare. Explainable machine learning models can be instrumental in holding machine learning systems accountable. Healthcare offers unique challenges for machine learning (ML) where the demands for explainability, model fidelity and performance in general are much higher as compared to most other domains.

While healthcare ML has demonstrated significant value, one pivotal impediment relates to the black box nature, or opacity, of many machine learning algorithms. Explainable models help move away from the black box nature.

In this research paper, KenSci:

• Explores the impact of Explainable or Interpretable Machine Learning Models in Healthcare
• Review the notion of interpretability within the context of healthcare, the various nuances associated with it, challenges related to interpretability which are unique to healthcare and the future of interpretability in healthcare.
• Demonstrates how the user can understand the arrival of predictions by the ML models

The coronavirus pandemic has transformed healthcare overnight. With their missions on the line, health systems are deploying creative solutions to improve care delivery. Traditional hospital models are being redefined through better-integrated provider teams and technology-driven holistic care, such as:

• Virtual front doors: triage models that quickly identify the appropriate level of care
• Beyond in-person care: new technologies for patients and providers to connect in non-traditional settings
• Accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence and remote care

Despite massive growth over twenty years, hospital medicine (HM) is still underdeveloped in many facilities — a reality made clear by the COVID-19 crisis. Though hospitals can never fully prepare for the unknowns of a pandemic, a tailored and intentional strategy is the first step to building a well-equipped HM program that can handle those types of challenges.

Key takeaways:

• The beginnings of HM vs. the practice today
• An overview of a tiered model of HM program development and evaluation
• How peers are approaching HM advancement
• What is needed to navigate the future of inpatient care

During the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, healthcare leaders scrambled to prepare clinicians for a wave of new patients and worked tirelessly to enable many employees to work remotely. This focus prompted innovation and acted as an evolutionary catalyst for some health systems.

In this whitepaper, you'll learn how two notable healthcare organizations — New Orleans-based LCMC Health and The Royal Marsden Hospital in London:

• Quickly ramped up remote working capabilities for employees and virtual visit strategies for patients
• Enhanced digital clinical collaboration throughout facilities; and
• Addressed the new software and hardware demands created by the pandemic

The monumental public health crisis created by the novel coronavirus exacerbated some of American healthcare's most enduring challenges. To safeguard provider well-being and ensure the delivery of high-quality care, decisionmakers at leading hospitals and health systems are rethinking their organization's approach to workforce management.

Workforce strategy will remain a top priority for hospital leaders well into the future as they work to lead their cash-strapped organizations and exhausted staff to a better future. This ebook contains insights for executing a smarter approach to managing the healthcare workforce.

Key learnings include:

• An overview of the nation's clinician shortage and the current prevalence of physician burnout
• Results from a recent Becker's survey of more than 100 hospital leaders and administrators
• The four components of a strong workforce optimization strategy

COVID-19 has brought unparalleled amounts of uncertainty and volatility to the healthcare industry. But there’s one thing hospital and health system executives can be certain of: Their business models will not return to what they were prepandemic.

Providers are facing a long-term decrease in commercial payment, coupled with a need to boost caregiver- and consumer-facing engagement, all during a significant economic downturn. Competition will be fierce as organizations work to address near-term cash pressures and liquidity concerns, and the window of opportunity that will determine provider success or failure is limited.

Download the white paper for insights on the key principles regarding what the future holds for providers in this new healthcare reality.

Key learnings for providers include:

• How competitive positions and market forces will impact strategies for rebuilding patient volumes, reducing operating expenses, and addressing new payment mechanisms
• The importance of a comprehensive consumer- and caregiver-centric digital strategy, including telehealth, call centers, and RPA
• The impact of COVID-19 on patient volumes, payer mix, and reimbursement cross-subsidization

As we continue to learn more about the clinical manifestations and implications of COVID-19, Dr. Khadeja Haye, TeamHealth’s National Medical Director for OB/GYN Hospitalist Services, and our Emerging Infectious Disease Task Force partnered together to develop a clinical guide on what we know about the impact of the virus on OB patients and the tactics hospitals and clinicians can employ to ensure safe, effective care of pregnant mothers and their babies.

TeamHealth is committed to keeping our hospital partners, clinicians and the healthcare community as a whole informed about the evolving clinical manifestations and implications of COVID-19.

Health care is forever altered. Is your organization ready to adapt? The coronavirus (COVID-19) has upended the entire health care landscape — and the danger and breadth of the pandemic has accelerated change to previously unseen speeds. It's up to health leaders to not only keep up with this rapid transformation, but to anticipate what comes next in the new reality. Download this perspective for insights on how C-Suite executives can assess their organizations' sustainability and agility in the face of this unprecedented crisis including:

• Identifying the new forces shaping health and health care dynamics

• Examining the risk and requirements of segment interdependencies

• Understanding the growing demand for greater agility

A new report from RevSpring, “Innovation in a Time of Crisis: Now and in the Future,” explains how healthcare providers and revenue cycle managers can adapt and continue to drive innovation.

Takeaways from this whitepaper include:

• Ideas for using existing patient engagement tools in creative new ways
• Ways to align payment options to patient’s needs — with a sensitivity toward those in financial distress — to maintain cash flow
• Strategies for driving the digital adoption patients have been waiting for and providers need to reduce costs

Clinicians must be able to rely on devices that make it possible to access all the information they need, including lab results, X-rays and other data. They must then be able to take all the different pieces of information and turn it into something that makes sense.

This executive summary explores:

• How purpose-built devices enhance telehealth
• Tailoring devices to fit clinical hubs
• The devices which help clinicians access needed information

Did you know that Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System named David L. Callendar, MD, as their new president and CEO and that Kaiser Permanente appointed Prat Vemana as their chief digital officer, a newly created role in August 2019? There were also a handful of unique positions filled this quarter!

The second quarter of 2019 continued to have exciting healthcare executive moves, including more than 50 CEOs and presidents who stepped into new roles, retired, or resigned during the quarter. Altogether, at least 122 hospital and health system C-suite executives were on the move during this time of the year.

Keep track of all the 2019 second quarter C-suite executive moves with this report.

While the coronavirus pandemic has presented an opportunity for health systems to more conveniently and affordably implement telehealth, the challenge is differentiating between interim point solutions and sustainable virtual care.

In this whitepaper from Force Therapeutics, you’ll learn how leaders and innovators are using technology to prepare for the reboot of elective surgery by:

• Increasing short-staff efficiency by digitizing preoperative workflows and patient optimization.
• Controlling leakage outside the system by seamlessly integrating services after surgery.
• Intelligently growing new programs and promoting them to the consumers of healthcare.

Exploding administrative costs, growing patient expectations, and increasing clinician burnout have pressured administrators to digitally transform the healthcare experience.

In response, leading healthcare organizations are rapidly investing in the automation of manual administrative processes like patient registration, clinical intake, provider documentation, and medical billing.

This whitepaper reviews 4 key strategies that healthcare administrators must consider to effectively implement intelligent automation in their organization.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• Common pitfalls to avoid when automating administrative workflows
• The return-on-investment to aim for when automating intake, clinical documentation and other administrative processes
• Best practices for integrating automated digital experiences with the EHR

As health systems focus on delivering care during the global COVID-19 health crisis, revenue cycle and finance leaders are bracing for seriously challenged cash flows and constrained revenues. Inpatient censuses are at record lows in preparation for surge capacity expectations and profitable elective procedures are postponed. That puts health care providers in a precarious financial position.

Through our client engagements, Optum Advisory Services experts have identified several no-regrets strategies that health systems should consider now. This white paper highlights tactics to stabilize performance and accelerate recovery.

Hospitals are a fast-paced, highly regulated and complex working environment, in which care teams often struggle to communicate effectively. The result can be increased stress on providers, inefficiency, and potentially poor patient outcomes.

While COVID-19 has highlighted the challenges of achieving effective care team collaboration, communication has been a pain point for clinicians for years.

In this whitepaper, PatientKeeper examines how healthcare leaders can analyze and manage the communication challenges facing the care team as a whole, including:

• Identifying common communication challenges that hinder providers’ ability to deliver care and increase the potential for physician burnout
• Navigating the variety of technologies available to improve clinical communication and thinking beyond the needs of today
• How to measure the effectiveness of these communication tools to ensure maximum ROI

The social determinants of health (SDOH) are increasingly recognized as critical drivers of health and well-being. SDOH data can help healthcare organizations better understand and manage a variety of chronic conditions, but the key is to find the right data, understand its relevance, and apply it directly to patient care.

In our latest white paper, ZeOmega co-authored with the Center for Open Data Enterprise (CODE), we present a new approach to improving population health outcomes by applying public and proprietary data sources to the identification and addressing of SDOH needs.

In The Social Determinants of Health: Improving Population Health With Data-Driven Insights, you’ll read about:

• Why SDOH are important to population health management
• What public data sources are available to address SDOH
• What conditions are commonly affected by SDOH
• How ZeOmega can help you apply SDOH data to your population health strategy

The coronavirus pandemic, and resulting economic impact, have created unprecedented clinical and financial challenges for healthcare providers. On the financial side, providers are urgently seeking alternative sources of revenue to counter diminishing traditional reimbursements. The markets should be one area of focus in these efforts. The historic low-rate environment presents an opportunity for many healthcare providers but requires a shift in investment strategy.

Fortunately, there are many strategies healthcare organizations can utilize to fully leverage available cash to maximize returns without undue risks. This article provides insights into:

• Days cash on hand
• Lines of credit
• Money market funds
• Fixed income investments
• Loans and bonds

The ability to optimize investment returns through proactive control of cash is substantial. These seven strategies can help organizations turn today's financial challenges into tomorrow's financial opportunities.

• Learn about the four common cash investing challenges healthcare providers encounter.
• Discover seven strategies that can form the basis of a beneficial approach to optimizing cash investments.
• Learn four critical characteristics healthcare providers should seek in their banking relationships.

A lot of the value of IT comes from the fact that software often can be deployed quickly and scaled efficiently. Particularly in the face of a pandemic, where the needs of the population evolve day to day, reaction time is crucial.

Read this whitepaper to discover just a few of the ways IT has rapidly transformed to meet the challenges and pressures this global pandemic is placing on patients, clinicians, IT, and security:

• Ensuring staff and clinicians are safe and healthy and enabling them to report illnesses
• Onboarding new clinicians, such as recent medical school graduates and traveling nurses, and other staff quickly, efficiently, and with as few touchpoints as possible
• Responding to the influx of potential patient inquiries, orchestrating triage, and facilitating scheduling and more

With the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access final rule, modified Conditions of Participation require hospitals — including psychiatric and critical access hospitals — to send electronic ADT notifications to a primary care provider identified by the patient and post-acute providers.

While the conditions aren’t optional, the benefits that come from them are. Hospitals that learn to leverage the CoP for collaboration will see additional benefits, including reduced care costs and improved patient outcomes.

This downloadable whitepaper will cover:

• What hospitals need to know about the new rules and how they impact technical and clinical interoperability
• How care teams can use CoP interoperability to improve patient outcomes — including a 60 percent reduction in hospital readmissions and a 32 percent reduction in opioid deaths
• How collaboration can help improve cash flow, including saving roughly $1 million in unnecessary care costs and increasing revenue 30 percent

As many of the nation's leading health systems continue to innovate toward value-based models of care, executives are increasingly investing in and implementing new technologies and processes designed to improve care quality, lower costs, and enhance both the patient and provider experience. Imaging services represent a prime target for optimization efforts that can support these aims.

Hospital and health system leaders looking to overcome financial difficulties, improve the patient experience and ensure providers are operating under optimal conditions should prioritize efforts to streamline imaging services.

This white paper details five best practices for optimized imaging services. Key learnings include:

• How to create a culture of collaboration
• How to identify appropriate key performance indicators (KPIs) and improvement benchmarks
• How optimized imaging services can support the pursuit of the Quadruple Aim

Asking for a pay cut, or trying to get less than what we're owed, is the opposite of what most of us are wired to do – and with good reason. It's natural to want our fair share, not to leave it behind.

Still, health systems around the country frequently experience inadequate payment. The complexity of the current reimbursement environment demands hospitals take a proactive approach to billing. Without a sound billing strategy for Hierarchical Condition Categories (HCC), for example, large organizations can wind up leaving millions of dollars on the table every year. Most of us aren't surprised to learn this, since we know that HCCs and clinical documentation can be a headache. This whitepaper dives deep into HCC reimbursement issues and offers insights into how a 100-plus physician group in northern Illinois increased its monthly reimbursements by $160,000 with a smart HCC strategy.

Download the whitepaper to learn:

• Why your organization needs an HCC strategy
• How to correctly capture HCCs in the EHR
• What to do to ensure Medicare Advantage is a profitable part of your institution

The continued growth of specialty pharmaceuticals requires hospital pharmacies to think differently about traditional inventory models. A consignment inventory model ensures critical medications are available when you need them, allowing you to focus on patient care instead of time-consuming manual processes, excessive carrying costs, or waste due to obsolescence.

In this article you'll learn:

• Key factors to consider when evaluating a consignment model
• How consigning emergency drugs with variable demand can help to reduce costs
• How an RFID-enabled consignment program automates manual tasks

In today’s competitive market, it is more critical than ever to attract and retain top talent.

Read the article to learn key strategies on reducing the staffing burden, including:

• Talent acquisition
• Retaining and engaging rehab talent

The future of DSOs is uncertain, given the unique set of challenges the dental industry now faces. In this whitepaper, IC System investigates several collection solutions that will maximize your organization's cash flow with smarter accounts receivable management solutions. Using a combination of these recommended strategies, technologies, and most of all empathy to work your patient debt, your DSO will experience higher recoveries and more efficient operations.

Familia Dental is a dental service provider that operates 42 practices across 6 states. Since opening in 2008, they have rapidly grown to serve over 450,000 patients a year, providing a wide range of general dentistry and orthodontic treatment to children and adults. This case study demonstrates the challenges they faced in trying to build an effective marketing and communications strategy, and how RevenueWell and our platform helped them execute against their goals.

The work of dental professionals is time intensive and hands-on, and the last thing they want is for their bookkeeping to be equally demanding. KPMG Spark is a small and medium-sized bookkeeping and tax service that provides dentists with real-time financial statements and personal bookkeepers to make running their practice easier than ever before.

Dental professionals can now focus on what they do best and leave the finances to the professionals. Tax services, business licensing, and payroll are just a few services that can be powered by KPMG Spark.

Read more about how we can partner together and help your practice continue to grow, with these 5 strategies.