Whitepapers - Now Available for Download

With more consumers covered by high-deductible health plans, patient payments represent a higher percentage of your revenue. And the primary tool for collecting those payments is patient statements. How well are yours working for you?

This whitepaper explores how experimentation enables providers to create statements that drive engagement, collections and patient satisfaction.

You’ll learn:

• Why patient statements are in the spotlight
• How consumer testing helps you create an effective statement
• How artificial intelligence and machine learning can automatically optimize to select the most effective prototype
• How Design Thinking is applied to patient statements to encourage prompt patient payments

Significant gaps in expected revenue are the ultimate “pain point” for hospital and health system executives, and revenue cycle leaders are no exception. Understandably, their focus is naturally drawn to immediate, bread-and-butter solutions like reducing avoidable write-offs and bad debt, and improving timely billing and follow-up.

A recent survey of revenue cycle leaders demonstrates growing attention to longer-term transformation beyond these basic metrics. As providers are coming to realize, they need to deal with immediate shortfalls in a way that also establishes the infrastructure — organizational as well as technological — for deep, strategic, sustainable change.

Key learning points:

• The top five pain points for revenue cycle executives — the electronic health record (EHR), patient engagement, clinical integration, managing cost and scale, and revenue rebalancing — are also opportunities for higher-level strategic change.
• The revenue cycle is in a unique position to contextualize and drive that change.
• Revenue-cycle-driven exercises like revenue rebalancing require a holistic understanding of the health system’s strengths and weaknesses and an awareness of the disparate processes that impact those areas. Better coordination of those processes translates into a smoother, more seamless patient experience, as well as improved performance.

Revenue cycle leaders and CFOs are faced with the persistent challenge of augmenting the revenue cycle management workforce in ways that reduce costs without adversely affecting productivity. However, common solutions such as offshoring certain RCM functions rarely generate desired results due to the effort required to maintain quality and manage vendors.

Enter intelligent automation — the use of this emerging technology in the revenue cycle has been shown to increase ROI for providers. The question facing RCM leaders is when and how to adopt this technology. KPMG LLP (KPMG) and Blue Prism have collaboratively developed a practical and profitable approach to achieving bottom line goals. The two have worked together and implemented intelligent solutions aimed at enhancing the customer experience, automating patient interactions, and improving access to care.

This white paper outlines:

• The business case for RCM automation
• Tips for getting started
• Sample use cases for automation

When CFOs work to cut costs in today's healthcare environment, achieving profitability is not the sole aim. Reducing costs in key areas can allow organizations to be nimbler and adapt to changing models of care and reimbursement. To achieve such a level of adaptability, healthcare CFOs are increasingly looking for new tools to eliminate fiscal waste and improve efficiency. Implementing these solutions, however, comes with a host of challenges, not the least of which is navigating budgetary restrictions.

This whitepaper offers an overview of the industry challenges most affecting the role of healthcare CFOs and details five plays for successful cost cutting, including:

• How to enhance staff engagement and productivity
• How to foster collaboration between external and internal stakeholders
• How to align benchmarks with strategy and commit to success

As more and more patients sign up for high deductible healthcare plans, patient obligation increases for providers of all types. But are patients keeping up with their bills? Research suggests that they are not. What are the risks of centering your collections efforts around patient obligation? And what are the alternatives?

Learn more about benefits of developing a robust payor reimbursement strategy and how it can offset underperformance in patient collections. This whitepaper outlines trends in patient collections, the current reimbursement environment, best practices to optimize payor reimbursements for both in- and out-of-network claims and how technology and outsourcing to experts can dramatically impact the financial side of your business. Learn how you can ensure your patients are able to continue to utilize your services and how to provide an excellent patient billing experience.

This whitepaper will help you:

• Determine your return on investment for payor collections vs. patient collections
• Understand the steps required to put together an effective payor collections program
• Develop a clear strategy to manage payor denials, delays and underpayments across claims types
• Understand where technology, data and workflow can most effectively be leveraged to increase success and reduce costs

The American healthcare system is at an inflection point. Care costs and patients' out-of-pocket expenses are rising, reimbursements are declining, and a presidential election is on the horizon. What the future of healthcare will look like, from a regulatory standpoint, is deeply uncertain.

While healthcare leaders may have substantive disagreements about the best ways to meet these challenges, few, if any, would advocate for the status quo. Big change is coming to healthcare — that much is certain. The question is which stakeholders are going to be the primary drivers of that change: providers, disrupters, regulators, or some amalgamation of these entities?

During a Becker's advisory call in October, several healthcare executives discussed the need for price transparency in healthcare, the lessons traditional provider organizations can learn from retail healthcare and what the future of healthcare delivery could look like.

This ebook is based on insights and ideas shared during the discussion.

While transactional businesses like retail focus on winning a single sale with a customer, healthcare is a "relational" industry where long-term relationships with customers are essential. And, in today's device-driven world, health systems need a comprehensive digital strategy to establish relationships with patients that extend beyond the four walls of a hospital.

At Becker's 5th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference in Chicago in October, leaders from Navigant, a Guidehouse company, led healthcare executives in a roundtable discussion on how hospitals can enhance their digital presence to improve revenue cycle management and consumer engagement.

Key learnings include:

• The benefits of robotic process automation
• The growth of consumerism and the importance of consumer contact centers
• Using technology to address challenges beyond the revenue cycle

Pediatric Associates, the largest privately-owned primary care pediatric practice in the country, cares for more than 500,000 patients—55% of whom are in risk-based contracts under Managed Medicaid. The organization found that many of its patients were utilizing the emergency department for low-acuity conditions that could be better treated either in a primary care office or through telehealth.

In this case study, Pediatric Associates discusses how it integrated telehealth into its triage line to divert unnecessary care from the ED and improve access.

Read the case study to learn how Pediatric Associates:

• Conducts more than 3000 telehealth visits per month with existing patients
• Uses telehealth to decrease patient wait times by 75%
• Reduced ER use by 60% among high ER utilizers for low-acuity conditions
• Expanded beyond its triage line to care for pediatric patients across Florida

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts launched its telehealth program, Well Connection, in 2016 by offerings its members access to both medical and behavioral health services. The health plan quickly found that Well Connection was being underutilized by its network of behavioral health providers.

In this case study, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts reveals its strategy for engaging its network of behavioral health providers in telehealth to address member access issues and increasing demand for mental health services.

When examining innovation in healthcare delivery, the perspective of community hospitals can be overlooked. While they may not have the largest footprint, small to midsized community and critical access hospitals are essential to in the U.S. healthcare system. Fourteen percent of Americans, or approximately 46 million people, live in rural counties, according to the Pew Research Center.

In October 2019, Allscripts hosted a private summit in Chicago at the Becker's Hospital Review 5th Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference for leaders from hospitals with 100 or fewer beds to discuss opportunities and challenges in the rural healthcare landscape, including innovation, clinician burden, population health and variation in clinical care and practice.

This whitepaper revisits the event and details actionable insights to help hospital leaders support the clinical care patients deserve and generate the ROI their organizations need.

Do you know how your competitors perform in clinical quality, cost, and market share? We do.

Can you identify the most impactful opportunities in quality, cost and market share? We can.

If you can, will you be able to sustain those changes? We will.

Pulse performance improvement takes an innovative vector, or service line, approach to focus on the most significant performance issues impacting clinical and operational performance. It resonates with health systems because it avoids ineffective silo-driven optimizations traditionally offered by most consulting firms.

Instead, Pulse utilizes powerful analytics to diagnose areas of opportunity and uses a continuum approach to span the organization (across clinical, revenue cycle, supply chain, pharmacy and post-acute domains) to identify areas where performance can be optimized.

Hospitals and health systems can realize significant, sustainable improvements without expansive and expensive teams of consultants and resources to achieve outcomes.

Read the whitepaper to learn:

• How to successfully leverage data by understanding true current performance
• The importance of thinking outside of the silo and into cross-functional service lines
• The blessing and challenge of widespread EHR implementation

As cyberthreats grow, patient data requires more than a single layer of password protection. Yet adding more log-in points will only add to administrative burden — Physicians already log in and out of networks and applications up to 70 times per shift. Today, hospital CIOs and CISOs need a detailed and sophisticated identity and access management strategy. This means knowing who accessed protected health information and whether they had the proper permissions. It means managing those provisions across thousands of employees with different levels of access. It also means adding security without hindering people who need access to hospital networks to do their jobs. It's time to make your identity and access management strategy secure and seamless.

Fill out the form to download a report on how to:

• Manage staff access rights to networks and applications
• Improve security without adding more passwords
• Simplify the authentication process for clinicians

The consumerism revolution in healthcare continues well into the new year. With the recent CMS price transparency rule and increasing out-of-pocket costs for patients, innovative health systems are realizing the need to create a consumer-centric patient financial experience to respond to the rapid changes.

Patients want and expect an easy-to-use and easy-to-understand solution when it comes to paying their healthcare bills. St. Luke’s University Health Network recognized they needed to strive for a patient financial experience that met the standards that Amazon and other major online retailers have trained consumers to expect. This motivated St. Luke’s to invest in their patient financial care, which in turn resulted in positive results in collecting, building patient loyalty, and overall long-term organizational growth.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about:

• How to address the critical challenge of healthcare affordability
• Enhancing the patient financial experience through easy-to-use and easy-to-understand solution that drives results
• Empowering patients by providing access and tools

Patients are increasingly behaving like consumers in a healthcare setting. As a result, they expect enhanced services and experiences when engaging with providers and health systems. How can health systems engage patients in an integrated effort that aligns with strategic goals to improve patient outcomes, improve efficiencies, reduce costs and enhance patient satisfaction?

This white paper examines important conditions and trends driving consumerism, evidence of the economic and reputational value of a positive consumer experience, examples of health systems successfully improving the patient experience, and a Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies approach to working with health systems to embrace the new era of consumerism.

Whether it's an unforeseen drug interaction, side effect or off-label indication, care teams need clinical information on drugs at their fingertips. The lack of a single, clear and evidence-based point of reference can create unwarranted care variation, costly disconnects between team members and even dissatisfied patients. To learn more about how to provide a concise, streamlined resource at the bedside, download the whitepaper.

Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper. 

*Did you know that Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad, Colo., selected Calvin Carey to serve as CEO and that St. Peter's Health Partners in Albany, N.Y., tapped Christopher Jordan to serve as chief nursing officer of acute care? There were also a handful of unique positions filled the last three months.

The third quarter of 2019 continued to have exciting healthcare executive moves. 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 third quarter C-suite executive moves with this report.

When it comes to medical care, children are not just "little adults." The field of Pediatric Emergency Medicine (PEM) requires specialized knowledge, training and experience to effectively care for infants, children and adolescents.

In a study published from the US News & World Report in August 2019, researchers found critically ill children to be more than three times as likely to die if they are taken to a hospital poorly equipped to provide emergency pediatric care than if they visit an emergency department well-prepared for resuscitation of pediatric patients.

This whitepaper explores how PEM differs from adult emergency medicine and offers tips for hospital leaders to build, grow or strengthen their PEM service.

Patient falls that result in injury increase care costs by $13,806 per case and increase patient length of stay by 6.9 days, according to The Joint Commission. With 1 million patient falls occurring per year — 26 percent of which result in some form of injury — falls represent a significant challenge for health systems.

To address this issue, most hospitals assign staff to sit in high fall risk patients' rooms. Sitters have never been proven effective and no matter how plentiful the staffing budget, no hospital can afford one-to-one staffing for every high fall risk patient. Leaders at Norfolk, Va.-based Sentara Healthcare decided to deploy technology to address the issue. And it worked. Since using technology to monitor patients at high-risk of experiencing a fall, fall rates have declined by as high as 80 percent in some units, generating significant cost savings.

More than 1.7 million adults in America develop sepsis each year. Sepsis is the top cause of hospital deaths and is the most expensive hospital-associated condition. As the healthcare industry transitions to value-based care delivery and payment, health systems are seeking additional opportunities to optimize care, reduce costs and keep patients safe. Sepsis is a prime target for these efforts.

Premier analyzed data from 870 healthcare facilities compiled a three-year period and found that providers are making noteworthy strides with sepsis care, as the overall mortality, readmissions and incidence of hospital-associated sepsis have declined; still, patients who develop sepsis in the hospital are more likely to suffer from septic shock, leading to more than $1.5 billion in added costs.

Ineffective workforce management policies can reduce employee engagement and increase turnover. A survey of 76 healthcare nursing and human resources leaders found that the biggest dissatisfiers for staff were unsustainable and/or unbalanced workloads and work/life balance.

This whitepaper examines five workforce management strategies that can boost staff engagement and have a positive impact on cost and quality metrics.

For hospitals and health systems, healing is the mission and patient safety is priority No.1

Some significant challenges to patient safety and optimal outcomes include infections, patient falls, distracted providers and expedited stroke care. Mortality from sepsis increases 8 percent every hour treatment is delayed. Hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. fall in the hospital each year, and a third to a half of those falls result in injury. Distraction has been shown to play a role in nearly 75 percent of medical errors. About 700,000 people in the U.S. have a stroke each year, and 24 percent of them die.

Read our eGuide to find out how mobile care teams can strengthen patient safety.

You'll learn how to:

• Keep sepsis alerts from dead-ending in the EMR
• Make bed exit alarms a more effective tool for fall intervention
• Help clinicians stay focused during critical patient care activities
• Allow a stroke team to be ready with the right intervention before the ambulance arrives

Annual emergency department visits in the U.S. reached 145.6 million in 2016, a 20 percent increase in just ten years. By addressing utilization rates and optimizing workflows, emergency departments can increase throughput, improve efficiency, and avoid preventable visits and admissions — ultimately saving on care costs and increasing revenue while providing better quality care.

Providers across the country are reducing ED utilization up to 81 percent by coordinating with behavioral health programs, redirecting low-acuity 911 calls to more appropriate providers, and tracking opioid misuse—among other tactics.

This whitepaper contains success from several provider organizations, including:

• Torrance Memorial Medical Center (Calif.)
• Mount Vista, Wash.-based Legacy Salmon Creek Medical Center
• The Portland Clinic (Ore.)

Almost 7 million people in America are living with a nonhealing wound right now. The same population is dealing with three to four additional chronic conditions on average, complicating their care. As hospitals and health systems work to improve the health of patient populations and ease the burden of chronic illness in their communities, leaders should consider partnering with a wound care team to help identify and deliver additional medical services to patients in need.

Read the study to learn how outpatient wound care centers are helping providers create healthier communities and reduce amputations by identifying and engaging patients in need of advanced treatment.

As health system leaders work to achieve better clinical outcomes, greater patient satisfaction, optimized staff engagement and improved financial standing, it's become clear the staffing models of old are not up to the challenge. Nursing leaders from ANA, AONL and AACN have identified patient-centered staffing as the path forward. Case studies from Milwaukee-based Advocate Aurora and Durham, N.C.-based Duke Health provide on-the-ground insights into the successful application of these strategies.

Key learning points in this whitepaper include:

• Critical factors contributing to nurse staffing challenges
• How technology, multidisciplinary teams, process redesign and executive buy-in are all crucial for successful patient-centered staffing
• Crucial first steps for successful launch of patient-centered staffing

For more than 25 years, health systems have invested in employed physician practices to varying degrees. Recently, we’ve seen a significant shift toward this trend. Though not a brand-new phenomenon, environmental changes have impacted the way these employed providers are managed. In this whitepaper, we’ll discuss primary concerns and benefits with employed provider models, with key takeaways such as:

• How to define the role of employed physicians
• What opportunities and issues accompany this model/how to understand and address them
• How to manage in a way that positively impacts productivity and ways to attain desired performance through critical success factors

Healthcare is a unique industry, but customer expectations are not. Health system leaders looking to re-invigorate their services can start by bringing patients' experiences in line with what consumers expect from other industries.

This paper outlines four accessible strategies for leaders to pursue, including:

• How to involve patients in service design
• How to clarify invoice confusions
• How to eliminate patient confusion
• How to recover when service stumbles

Each year, it seems the burden clinicians carry gets a bit heavier — the weight of administrative tasks increases, meeting patient needs becomes harder, and the only staples in the industry seem to be uncertainty and rapid change.

More than 470 clinical staff participated in Spok's 2019 clinician burnout survey. Read about their perceptions of clinician burnout and how their organizations are working to tackle it.

The survey revealed:

• 92% of clinicians called burnout a “public health crisis”
• 90% believe increased and ineffective technology contributes to risk of clinician burnout
• 65% say they are prevented from seeking help because their organization lacks resources

Download today to also learn:

• The role of technology in clinician burnout
• What measures clinicians believe will help
• How organizations are responding

While many patients face the reality of high deductible insurance plans, they also walk into the pharmacy with no perception of what they might pay. More than half of patients will abandon their prescriptions when they cost on average $125 or more, endangering their health. Last year, CoverMyMeds partnered with RelayHealth to launch RxBenefit Clarityä, a real-time benefit check solution that provides health care providers and their patients with medication cost at the point of prescription within one of the largest EHRs.

Between March 2018 and January 2019, over 120,000 health care providers used RxBenefit Clarity to generate over 108 million transactions with 97 percent price accuracy.

In this case study, read about:

• The various options health care providers can give patients by leveraging an open network of EHR systems, pharmacies and health plans such as cash price and medication alternatives
• The decreased time-to-therapy RxBenefit Clarity provides by flagging and resolving roadblocks such as prior authorization early
• Solution optimizations that have expanded program reach

Patient flow at a crawl, outcome measures flagging and clinician tensions running high. Sound like an average day in your hospital's emergency department? If so, it might be time for a total ED transformation.

Transformation can be complex and dependent on a multitude of factors. Fill out this form to receive a whitepaper on the universal strategies to consider when taking on an ED transformation project and address the problem at its root — and see how Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa, Calif., committed to ED overhaul and succeeded.

The healthcare industry's transition to value-based care models makes it more important than ever for hospitals to work closely with post-acute care providers to improve patient outcomes and reduce readmissions. Many hospitals struggle to reduce readmissions due to a lack of real-time, actionable data from skilled-nursing facilities.

To gain access to the same data SNFs have in real time, many hospitals are turning to Real Time Medical System's platform and improving their clinical and financial performance as a result.

Download this whitepaper to learn more about:

• Common challenges hospitals face in managing a post-acute SNF network
• How hospitals are using real-time SNF data to reduce readmissions by 50 percent or more
• How a Pennsylvania health system achieved savings and reduced readmissions by building a program around real-time SNF data

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

Lean Healthcare principles can be an invaluable tool in helping hospitals and health systems improve operational, financial and clinical performance. This is especially true in emergency departments that are often ripe with opportunities for process improvement that can enhance throughput, metrics, quality of care and patient satisfaction. Emergency department staffing and operational excellence have been cornerstones of TeamHealth’s services to hospitals since 1979.

This white paper will show you more about the ways TeamHealth worked with Montgomery, Alabama-based Baptist Health to use Lean Healthcare principles and tools to make dramatic improvements in emergency department clinical and operational performance.

According to the CDC, there are nearly 700,000 hospital-acquired infections every year in the U.S. In 2016, Clearwater, Fla.-based BayCare Health System began trialing UVC disinfection technology at its community hospitals. The trial was a success.

In 2017, BayCare, which comprise more than 28,000 individual providers across the Tampa Bay area, implemented UVC disinfection technology systemwide. This case study details the BayCare infection control journey and features Suzanne Chandler, RN-BC, MSN, CIC, Director-Infection Prevention & Control for BayCare Health System. Read the case study to discover how the health system successfully rolled out its UVC program.