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

Healthcare leaders today face increasing pressure to cut medical expenses, improve quality and create new revenue channels — even as they seek to protect their market share and to grow.

It is important to gather the right data and ask the right questions when sizing up alternative payment models.

The new CFO playbook provides an overview of six different models and includes:

• Questions CFOs ask when evaluating potential models
• Investments to anticipate
• Contract success dependencies
• Benefits you can build on and more

In this Q & A with Jon Ellsworth, Banner Health’s Strategic Sourcing Director, we uncover how predictive and prescriptive analytics drive fast and effective decision-making for one of the nation’s leading healthcare supply chains. By re-evaluating the way that their purchasing department consumes data analytics, Banner Health is strengthening their position at the negotiation table.

See how their supply chain is:

• Proactively addressing spend opportunities within purchased services
• Shortening their sourcing lifecycle via predictive analytics
• Prioritizing higher-value projects across clinical and non-clinical service contracts

Not long ago, Kettering (Ohio) Health found itself in a situation familiar to many healthcare networks. The nine-hospital system was satisfied with its central EHR platform, but patients still lacked clarity in their billing and payment process. Kettering saw a lower-than-desired user rate for the payment function on the patient portal. Patients still relied heavily on paying bills over the phone. It was alarmingly clear: Something had to change for the patients of Kettering — quick.

After making specific changes to the patient payment process, Kettering saw online payments jump 87 percent and calls for representative- assisted transactions decrease by 62 percent. In this whitepaper, learn how Kettering overhauled its financial payment processes and reimagined how painless it could be for patients by holding itself to the same bar as large tech-driven retailers versus hospitals.

Here’s what you’ll learn:

• How Kettering achieved a 91 percent self-service payment rate in 2 months
• How key Kettering leaders overcame cultural resistance to modernizing its payment processes
• What Kettering is doing to help patients better understand their financial exposure and personalized payment options

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

Hospitals spend a lot of time and money reinforcing firewalls and protecting server infrastructure. But many organizations leave endpoints like PCs and printers unprotected. These seemingly innocuous tools can be the gateway for malware, putting the entire network — and the patient data connected to it — at risk.

UMass Memorial Health Care, the only designated Level I Trauma Center in Central Massachusetts, had a legacy telestroke program that was built using 14 different communication systems and required 21 steps to complete a consult. In an effort to simplify this program, UMass Memorial partnered with American Well to consolidate communication tools and automate workflows.

Read this case study to learn how UMass Memorial:

• Conducted more than 1,000 telestroke consults in six months
• Decreased the number of communication systems from fourteen to four
• Reduced the number of steps required for a consult by 38%
• Expanded telehealth to its teleNICU program

Patients want to feel safe and secure during their next physicians visit. But with over one billion people affected by data breaches in 2018 alone, it's no surprise that consumer confidence in healthcare is falling.

Outlined in this whitepaper, readers will learn about trends in healthcare security, as well as solutions to reduce risk of a breach by understanding:

• Breach notification requirements under HIPAA’s rules and regulations
• The costly consequences of a data breach
• How advancements in technologies can offer additional risk

Leading healthcare organizations are leveraging the power of the internet of things and blockchain to improve patient outcomes and optimize internal operations. Read this whitepaper to find out what healthcare professionals can realistically expect from IoT and blockchain in the future and encounter real-world examples of how healthcare organizations are already benefiting from these innovations.

Learning Points:

• Discover how IoT fits in the Healthcare space
• See how industry-leading organizations are leveraging blockchain to optimize their operations
• Learn the power of data-driven Healthcare

Learn how VCU Health’s investment in staffing technology has helped them better predict, plan and adjust their staffing. With more data-driven staffing decisions, they can optimize staff distribution and improve unit financial performance. And, their staff has more input into scheduling, which boosts satisfaction.

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.

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.

Medical care plays only a small role in what makes a person—and a population—healthy. While medical care receives the greatest share of resources and attention, social determinants play a larger role in determining what make a person healthy.

What has all of this got to do with providing value-based care? Find out in this issue of Next Now, an electronic magazine made possible by Allscripts.

In this issue of Next Now, Allscripts explores factors that contribute to a person’s health, do a deep dive into the social determinants of health, then look at policy implications affecting a comprehensive approach to improve community health and well-being.

Healthcare is one of the fastest-changing industries in the U.S.—with new policies, technologies, and even competition shifting how providers plan for the future. In this whitepaper, learn about how healthcare organizations like yours can leverage a strategic plan to bring goal-setting to your financial planning for the present and the future. Read about how strategic planning can help your organization better determine expansion in new locations, access points, and services, to plan for growth and move forward with a more agile approach to planning.

From this whitepaper, readers will learn:

• What strategic planning is and how best to integrate it with your financial plan
• How to leverage each part of your organization to help ensure holistic success, today and in the future
• How to create a strategic plan, using specific financial goals to optimize your growth

A growing number of emergency departments are employing Medication-Assisted Treatment (MAT), which combines medication intervention and behavioral therapy to quickly initiate recovery. The results are better outcomes, reduced readmissions, and improved ED efficiency.

Widespread acceptance of this treatment is largely being driven by three factors:

• With MAT vs. traditional treatment, patients are almost twice as likely to stay in a 30-day treatment program.
• Patients use fewer inpatient addiction-treatment services.
• As opioid-related visits and readmissions overwhelm EDs, earlier and more effective treatment is required.

As the health industry shifts from volume to value, patient outcomes are replacing revenue as a central measure of health system success. In response, lab leaders must think beyond their own cost centers and expand the lab’s capacity to support value based strategic objectives.

Position the lab as a strategic pillar by creating value across all programs. The following steps are designed to help lab leaders reframe and elevate the lab’s position as a core component of systemwide success.

What you’ll learn:

• Identify how the lab contributes to the system’s strategic imperatives.
• Use data to illuminate the path forward.
• Identify how lab services contribute to Total Cost of Care.
• Change the way you measure success.
• Adopt a new language.
• Maintain a strong footing in both models (volume to value) during the transition.

Is your Medicare claims process helping or hurting your hospital? Medicare billing is not for the faint of heart and can be frustrating even for the most seasoned biller. That's why the Medicare experts at eSolutions have created this guide to help you learn the ins and outs of the claims process so you can get paid quickly and accurately.

What you’ll learn:

• Revenue forecasting using claim data
• Turning problematic claims into revenue
• 3 steps to improve your claims process

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.