Whitepapers - Now Available for Download

When patients say no to treatment because of the price tag, it costs your group thousands of dollars in lost revenue every month.

Establishing a solid patient financing system and effectively presenting to patients will help boost your profitability and ensure patients can afford the treatment they need. Here are five reasons patient financing is key to any DSO’s success, along with tips to help dentists, practice managers and treatment coordinators effectively present financing options to significantly increase the group’s profitability

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

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.

There is significant momentum behind electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS), with mandates being passed at the national and state levels. While your organization may already be considering an EPCS solution, it’s important to understand the complexity of such a project, including the DEA requirements of EPCS.

There are a number of tactical steps that IT, clinical leadership, pharmacy, application/EHR teams, compliance/credentialing departments, and others must take together to successfully implement EPCS and realize its significant benefits. These steps can be organized into five key phases: assessment, preparation, testing, enrollment, and deployment.

Our EPCS Readiness Guide provides the steps performed during each phase, including the suggested departmental owner of each task, to help you keep your EPCS project on track.

The EPCS Readiness Guide includes:

• The most important steps to follow in each phase of the project
• A suggested timeline to map out your EPCS initiative
• A handy matrix you can use to track your progress
• Helpful tips and references

Is your healthcare organization in need of digital transformation? Download this white paper to learn how to consolidate legacy infrastructure, simplify management, align IT to embrace technologies such as cloud computing, AI, and IoT. This white paper will explain how to recognize the importance of becoming more agile, efficient and cost-effective in meeting both business and patient expectations.

In this white paper, healthcare organizations will learn how to:

• Leverage cloud based technologies
• Gain actionable insights with AI and data analytics
• Digitally transform healthcare and much more!

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.

As health system leaders work to balance clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction, staff engagement, and financial and compliance outcomes, it’s becoming more and more clear that the staffing status quo is not sustainable. Nursing leaders from ANA, AONL and AACN share their thoughts on why patient centered staffing is the path forward. Case studies from Advocate Aurora and Duke Health provide insights into successful staffing strategies.

Key learning points:

• Critical factors contributing to the staffing challenge
• How technology, multidisciplinary teams, process redesign and executive buy-in are all crucial for successful 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
• Please fill out the form to download the whitepaper.

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

Fifteen of the top 20 US News and World Report Hospitals also appear in the top 20 national ranking for orthopedics. As leading Centers of Excellence shift towards greater value, they're investing in orthopedic episodic care management to future-proof their organization.

In this whitepaper from the Force Therapeutics team, you’ll learn how 60+ leading ortho groups are turning their pain points into opportunities by:

• Controlling patient-generated cost by engaging patients across the entire journey
• Extending reach into the home by optimizing navigation and clinician workflows
• Predicting outcomes by creating a process for data collection and evidence-based change

Reducing unnecessary clinical variation presents a considerable challenge for hospitals and health systems, but it is a challenge that needs to be overcome. Unwarranted variations in care not only adversely affect care quality and outcomes but can also cost hospitals millions.

Operating rooms are substantial cost centers for hospitals and health systems, making them a prime target for clinical variation reduction efforts. Optimizing surgical performance and OR utilization can yield better outcomes for patients and better financial results for providers.

Read this white paper for a breakdown of best practices for optimizing OR management and surgical care.

Learning points include:

• The role of data in performance optimization
• How to identify top performers and leverage their expertise to raise the performance of others
• How to leverage outside resources to improve surgical care

Healthcare organizations have significant pressure to deliver improved care at the lowest possible cost and healthcare leaders are increasingly being pressed to improve financial, clinical, and operational performance in new ways. This white paper looks at why hospitals are underperforming and why the traditional way of fixing problems may no longer be viable. It also provides insight on how hospitals can remain competitive by using a data-driven, integrated, and cross-functional approach to driving operational and clinical performance improvement that results in sustainable outcomes.

Key learning points include:

• A more effective and modern approach to improving performance
• Thinking outside of the traditional siloed approach to remediation
• The importance of data in identifying, prioritizing, and remediating opportunities for improvement
• How to put your data to work to see trackable and manageable results
• Four steps to drive quantifiable and sustainable improvements in cost per case, length of stay, and quality performance

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.

Standardized metrics, open data standards, new reimbursement models and greater stakeholder involvement identified as keys to wider adoption of value-based care.

Faced with multiple challenges, including the aging population, endemic chronic disease, rising patient demands, clinician burn-out and the soaring cost of care, healthcare systems worldwide are increasingly being stressed to their limits. As a result, patient outcomes often remain sub-optimal, not through want of trying but simply due to lack of effective resources. Yet the transition to value-based care, which is widely seen as the solution to many of today’s problems, has been slow to materialize. This positioning paper from Philips offers a perspective on why this is the case and proposes a set of measures to accelerate the implementation and scale up of value-based care.

Central to the position paper’s argument is the belief that all stakeholders, including industry and policy makers, need to work together and share the risks in order to build a successful and sustainable future for value-based healthcare – one that achieves the quadruple aim of better health outcomes, improved patient experiences, better staff satisfaction and lower cost of care. To illustrate what can be achieved, the paper highlights numerous examples of how to implement value-based care strategies.