Whitepapers - Now Available for Download

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 requires, 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

The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the nation's healthcare system on multiple fronts. In addition to delivering care to those in need among intensifying demand, hospital executives must also focus on their organizations long-term fiscal health as the pandemic has pushed the overall health of the economy into precarity.

It's estimated that indirect spend can account for 15 to 27 percent of total operating expenses. Meanwhile, U.S. hospitals overspend an average of $39 billion annually on clinical and nonclinical purchased services.

Purchased services, while commonplace in supply chain sourcing strategies, remain a final frontier for exploring spend optimization. With the possibility of quick time to savings and long-term strategic potential, we've identified six common themes among organizations with successful purchased services programs in place.

Many leaders of America's health systems are walking a fiscal tightrope with their organization's long-term viability balanced on their shoulders. Margins are thin and the stakes are high. Enter value-based care.

While many experts argue healthcare's traditional fee-for-service payment models have contributed to the nation's ballooning healthcare cost crisis, transitioning to value-based models brings its own challenges — challenges that can only be met with innovation. However, with limited resources, hospital leaders have to be savvy investors when it comes to innovation. Each piece of technology or new process must be integrated with a tangible ROI in mind.

During an executive event sponsored by Philips at Becker's 8th Annual CEO & CFO Roundtable in Chicago, hospital leaders gathered and engaged in a discussion about current barriers to innovation and how providers might overcome them. This white paper is based on their conversation.

The landscape of healthcare revenue appears bleak: costs and expenses are rising, while reimbursements decline. Traditionally, solutions focus on preventative measures, yet costly write-offs remain ever-present. This is especially true with respect to commercial claims, where denials are plentiful and appeals complicated and labor intensive.

How, then, can you mitigate loss without straining your resources? One answer is claims appeals through the Federal ERISA process. Through specialization in Federal ERISA Law, the experienced staff of ERISA Recovery can collect on aged claims without undue burden on your systems.

This whitepaper gives an overview of the benefits provided by ERISA Recovery, including:

• How focusing on denied, aged commercial claims can impact revenue
• Why Federal ERISA appeals are the ideal solution for such claims
• How ERISA Recovery can work without affecting your existing processes

Gone are the days when patient billing was primarily a back office process between healthcare providers and payers. With patients now shouldering more of the cost of their care, providers' financial health is more closely tied to patient out-of-pocket payments. Given the shifting financial realities of revenue cycle, innovative providers are adopting new consumer-centric strategies to optimize their collection rate and lower costs. By offering modern, easy-to-use tools to engage directly with patients on administration, billing and payment, these providers are simultaneously enhancing the patient experience and improving key financial results.

Download this whitepaper to:

• Understand the four major barriers to a better patient financial experience
• Learn how leading providers are leveraging technology to enhance and personalize the patient financial experience
• Uncover the best ways to get started with adopting a patient-centric financial engagement process

Healthcare organizations collect massive amounts of clinical, financial and operational data. But they’re often challenged by the “last mile” – transforming that data into meaningful insights for front-line clinicians that strengthen their bottom line.

This whitepaper examines the challenge of connecting clinicians to insights that improve revenues. Several healthcare leaders share their perspectives on the tools and strategies needed to empower clinicians with insights that help improve clinical and operational performance:

• The importance of point-of-care analytics
• Improving data quality, transparency and accessibility
• Standardizing care for higher quality and revenues
• The benefits of tracking and sharing performance insights

The whitepaper features expert views from:

• Doug Mitchell, MD – Co-founder and CEO, Adfinitas Health
• Dennis Deruelle, MD – Executive Director of Hospital Medicine, American Physician Partners
• Steve Liu, MD – Founder and Chief Medical Officer, Ingenious Med
• Chris Hegge – Head of Product Development, Ingenious Med

Today’s EHR was not designed to handle collaborative patient care or to position hospitals and health systems for value-based care success.

EHRs do not capture enough information to tell the whole story of individual patients or populations, do not deliver the level of context needed to develop and extract necessary insights and do not easily share data with everyone who needs it.

Download Geneia’s whitepaper, "Hospital Success in Data-Driven, Value-Based Care" to learn:

• Steps hospitals can take to capture crucial social determinant of health data
• Key considerations for choosing a population health management solution that seamlessly integrates with the existing EHR

In the decade since the HITECH Act was passed, first-generation electronic health record systems provided a foundation for innovations such as electronic prescribing, clinical decision support and predictive analytics.

While usability and productivity issues with EHRs have been well documented, there are significant untapped opportunities to optimize the EHR and health IT to benefit everyone from provider to patient.

In this whitepaper, PatientKeeper outlines a vision for the future of health IT through the next decade, which includes:

• New data-driven approaches that leverage the clinical information being captured by the EHR to improve patient outcomes and reduce physician burnout
• Optimized communication between physicians, nurses and ancillary staff to produce better patient outcomes as efficiencies improve
• Better interoperability to improve care coordination and inspire opportunities for ideas like telemedicine to alleviate physician shortages

As Medicare Advantage plans improve their performance, enrollment rises. With increased enrollment comes a greater need for quality data to help health plan leaders understand their member population. Initiatives meant to maximize reimbursement, manage risk and implement quality improvements all rely on health plans having accurate patient data.

The problem is that the most critical, valuable data such as medical history and clinician notes are locked away in unstructured text and likely not being used.

Read this whitepaper to learn how innovative technology solutions can be leveraged by health plans to extract clinical meaning from unstructured data.

Healthcare data can be ten times more valuable than credit data on the black market. This makes hospitals and health systems prime targets for cyberattacks. According to HHS, there were 477 healthcare data breaches reported in 2017 — more than one per day — impacting 5.579 million patient records. The problem has only intensified. In the first half of 2019 alone, cybercriminals breached 32 million patient records.

This whitepaper explores the greatest threats to healthcare data security, evaluates the pros and cons of the top compliance technology, and what details steps your hospital can take to reduce exposure.

Key learning points include:

• Tips for identifying data vulnerabilities in technology, processes and staff training
• The four primary options to protect credit card data

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.

Clinicians shouldn’t have to adapt to their digital tools. When digital tools are created through a proven user-centered design program, the result is a product that meets user needs and achieves their goals. Allscripts developers follow a rigorous user-centered design process, which enables them to understand clinicians' key concerns, create innovative solutions and measure the results.

A rigorous user-centered process asks, “What would make this the most helpful for the user?” The answer fuels innovation and goes beyond delivering merely a usable solution, but one that actively helps the user.

A human-factors approach considers how humans interact with technology and seeks to improve HIT usability. Clinicians and human-factors scientists alike recognize how taking this approach to software development can improve patient care.

In this issue of Next Now, Allscripts explores the latest thinking in HIT software usability, takes a look at what experts in the field have to say about the impact of human factors, and outlines how Allscripts is examining its approach to usability.

The digital transformation is great, but is it working for healthcare? Decades into the digital age, healthcare data still isn't living up to its promise. But it could.

In this e-book, we’ll show you how Health Catalyst has developed a new model for its Data Operating System (DOS™) to bring healthcare organizations the benefits of a more flexible computing infrastructure in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

• This e-book outlines next-generation best practices:
• Identify the levers for improved healthcare data analytics
• Learn seven key capabilities to maximize your analytics investment
• Understand the questions you need to ask to assess your current data analytics capabilities and determine the best next steps

Also, see how Queen’s Health Systems used data analytics to better identify at-risk patients.

Netsmart, one of the longest-standing healthcare IT companies in the country, designed an electronic health record (EHR) to address substance use disorders, specifically opioid addiction. Netsmart partnered with American Well to integrate telehealth into this substance use-specific EHR. Through this integration, providers can initiate virtual visits within the EHR via on-demand or scheduled visits.

Read this case study to learn how this integration:

• Provides health systems with better access to psychiatrists and addiction specialists
• Allows ED physicians to make better decisions regarding substance use and behavioral health
• Helped a health system reduce ED wait times, achieving a 33% reduction in costs for consumers
• Combines telehealth, opioid registries, and quality indicators to meet the payment of value-based care for opioid addiction

A study conducted at a Texas hospital showed how EHR-integrated digital whiteboards in patient rooms outperform traditional marker boards in effectiveness, efficiency and experience.

This whitepaper gives an overview of the intended uses and perceived challenges of in-room patient whiteboards, as well as:

• How whiteboards with integrated technology provides advantages in accuracy, time savings, satisfaction, education outcomes and value
• Why handwritten marker boards can negatively affect quantifiable outcomes and qualitative patient and staff feedback
• What should be considered for a successful deployment of a digital whiteboard solution

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

Nitin Patel, MD, chief digital officer of Prisma Health, a nonprofit health system based in Columbia, S.C., believes print can play an active and critical role in workflow, patient care, outcomes and healthcare costs. In this whitepaper, Dr. Patel discusses three ways advanced printing technology can support clinical goals in a value-based care environment.

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.

Governance, risk, and compliance — or GRC — as applied to provider data management is a coordinated strategy with benefits that bridge often discordant roles, departments, and workflows. symplr has created a Gold Standard blueprint of procedural best practices built into its solutions.

Learn how:

• symplr convened industry experts to ratify best practices used in parallel or incorporated into its credentialing technology.
• Pairing automated, professional services-level guidance with software solves common credentialing, enrollment, and quality improvement problems
• Embedding best practices into your workflows enables strategic decision-making

Now more than ever, data-driven staffing decisions are mission critical. Learn how health system leaders are leveraging innovations in both technology and workforce management strategy to optimize their workforce in a way that positively impacts patients, staff and the bottom line.

Considering an enterprise-wide solution for lab operations? To further extend the value of the laboratory and support the organization’s strategic initiatives, consider these five factors when assessing enterprise-wide technology for lab operations:

• Costs for lab components will be higher than expected.
• Best-of-breed lab systems support strategic imperatives.
• Limited lab functionality creates new gaps in care.
• Best-of-breed technology supports consolidation and growth.
• The downstream effects of disruption are far-reaching.

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

Healthcare is now the top-targeted industry, and the largest attack vector is unsecured remote access. In the Ultimate Guide to Third-Party Remote Access: Healthcare, gain insight about risks associated with third-party remote access and learn to provide access without compromise.

• Learn about unique third-party remote access risks to the healthcare industry
• Better understand industry compliance
• Protect access credentials and permissions
• Evaluate compliance using our HIPAA and HITECH checklist

Because unsecured remote access is quickly becoming the main attack vector, take steps to protect your network without sacrificing efficiency, security, or compliance

Optimal care delivery is a necessity in today’s healthcare environment. As the foundation for long-term hospital and health system performance improvement sustainability, care transformation is necessary to generate financial rewards and drive added value by improving care outcomes, eliminating unnecessary variation and ensuring consistent application of evidence-based practices across the continuum of care.

In this white paper, Premier®, a leading healthcare improvement company, uniting an alliance of more than 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems, provides an overview of the five strategic elements behind creating a healthcare culture that is centered on optimal care delivery.

Did you know that Kaiser Permanente selected a new chairman and CEO and that Tenet Healthcare promoted Saum Sutaria, MD, to president and COO? There were also a handful of unique positions filled as of late.

The last few months continued to have exciting healthcare executive moves. Altogether, at least 123 hospital and health system C-suite executives were on the move during this time of the year.

Keep track of all the recent executive moves with this report

Hospital and health system employer branding can make or break recruitment efforts. Nearly 70 percent of healthcare job seekers would reject a job offer if the company had bad reviews or a poor image as an employer.

This guide will help you solidify employer branding as a priority initiative at your healthcare organization. It includes a step-by-step roadmap for winning executive buy-in and is a source of critical, relevant data to make your case for employer branding. You already know employer branding is no longer a “nice to have” to attract and retain great talent in this competitive market - here’s your chance to break down barriers and start taking action.

Download this whitepaper to gain:

• A better understanding of your internal landscape and identify your key players
• A step-by-step guide on how to support your business case with relevant industry data
• An outline for crafting your rock-solid plan for winning leadership alignment

Leaders at Albany, Ga.-based Phoebe Putney Health System recognized that excessive overtime was costing their organization millions of dollars. The CNO and CFO worked together to create a cross-functional team that launched a workforce management initiative to save the organization $3M in one year.

Read this case study to learn how the health system:

• Standardized staffing practices and prioritized its workforce management solution rollout to realize cost savings more quickly
• Improved staffing processes to support both staff satisfaction and cost savings
• Created a 24/7 central staffing office to provide a hub for moving staff more efficiently to minimize agency and overtime costs

It’s unfortunate but true that today’s surgeons are more prone to burnout and its effects than other physicians. It takes its toll on surgeons both at home and work, and many healthcare organizations have made it a priority to alleviate the administrative burdens that contribute to burnout. Although there are many approaches based on each organization and each surgeon, computer-assisted physician documentation (CAPD) solutions purposefully designed and built for the ways surgeons work is one such way.

Download the whitepaper to discover:

• 10 ways CAPD technologies drive surgeon satisfaction
• How to bring order to a disorderly surgical documentation process
• How artificial intelligence applied to surgical documentation workflow allows surgeons to better reflect the delivery of patient care

Every day patients are becoming more engaged in making healthcare decisions and managing the costs of their care. Core to this responsibility is understanding what they owe for services, and why, which can be difficult if they’re receiving numerous bills from multiple providers for a single care event.

Consumers may be driving the need for consolidated statements, but the end result also benefits providers by helping to drive patient satisfaction, collections, and cost savings via less paper, printing, and postage.

Download the whitepaper co-authored by Ernst & Young LLP, to learn:

• A 4-step readiness plan to help you prepare
• Keys to success
• Selecting the right collaborator(s)

Consumer demands for a more connected experience are turning traditional care models upside down at a time when growth and margin compression are exacerbated by persistent reimbursement changes. Health system executives from across the country convened in Chicago in late 2019 to discuss these issues and suggested solutions at the third annual Guidehouse (formerly Navigant) CEO Forum.

Download the white paper to learn about the collective insights, lessons learned, and best practices from CEO Forum executives and experts on overcoming current and future healthcare pressures.

Key topics include how to:

• Translate consumer engagement strategies from other industries to healthcare
• Gain a competitive advantage with digital health strategies
• Overcome healthcare pain points, such as margin preservation and reimbursement obstacles
• Drive more value from EHRs and other advanced digital investments

Hospital executives are tasked with ensuring clinicians have the necessary equipment to deliver the best patient care possible. Amid industrywide financial challenges, healthcare executives can best ensure individual providers have what they need by not making superfluous medical device purchases and optimizing the useful life of current clinical assets.

In November 2019, at Becker's 8th Annual CEO & CFO Roundtable in Chicago, the clinical asset management provider TRIMEDX hosted an executive roundtable to explore how data-driven clinical asset management help protect patients and a health system's bottom line. Attendee participants included hospital CEOs, chief revenue cycle officers and COOs, among other leadership roles. This whitepaper is based on their discussion.

Key learning points include:

• How to create better informed equipment replacement strategies with data.
• How to extend the useful life of medical equipment.
• How to improve patient safety, clinician satisfaction and equipment utilization through optimized clinical asset management.

The latest analysis by Premier Inc. on maternal healthcare highlights that excess hospital costs in labor and delivery are in part due to potentially preventable complications and pre-existing chronic conditions.

Key findings of this whitepaper include:

• Complications, including severe maternal morbidity (SMM) factors and chronic conditions, add on average 20 percent to the cost to hospitals to perform a vaginal delivery and 25 percent to the cost to perform a cesarean delivery.
• Women with SMM stay in the hospital 70 percent to 75 percent longer, on average, and their care averages 88 percent to 111 percent more in hospitals’ cost compared to uncomplicated deliveries.
• Behavioral health disorders that complicate childbirth add 27 percent and nearly 36 percent to the cost of uncomplicated vaginal and cesarean deliveries, respectively.

This whitepaper explores the opportunity to improve outcomes and avoid excess costs and longer lengths of stay by working across provider networks to ensure appropriate care prior to childbirth, and standardizing processes to identify and prevent labor and delivery complications.

The primary care system is collapsing. There’s no influx of new primary care physicians preparing to enter practice and the gap between supply and demand is already at a breaking point. Health system leaders must find ways to employ technology that increases the ability to quickly deliver high-quality care to meet the growing needs of our patients.

Fill out the form to receive a report on:

• What’s driving the collapse of one of the most important segments of the healthcare industry
• The tools and technology that will propel primary care into the 21st century
• Actionable steps your healthcare system can use to meet the primary care needs of your current patients while attracting new ones

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.

On any given day, about 1 in 31 hospitalized patients have at least one Healthcare-Associated Infection, or HAI. Altogether, about 687,000 patients acquired infections while being treated in acute care hospitals in the U.S. in 2015 — and about 72,000 of these patients died. ²

These outcomes are obviously not acceptable from a clinical standpoint, but with the rise of value-based care models and patient accessibility to each hospital’s mortality and infection rates, healthcare organizations can suffer financially if they are not delivering high quality care.

Read HP's executive summary on Discovering the Clinical and Financial Value of Sanitized Devices to learn the health and economic gains from having equipment that can be cleaned and disinfected properly.

With more wireless devices being used in healthcare facilities and the proximity in which these devices are operating near medical equipment, it's imperative to consider how to best protect your patients from electromagnetic radiation. Additionally, U.S. smartphone penetration has hit 77 percent, meaning patients and their families are entering facilities with devices that contribute to the saturation of electromagnetic radiation. This proliferation of wireless technology increases the likelihood of a crucial medical device being exposed to electromagnetic interference.

Every year the FDA receives hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of reports of malfunctioning medical devices involving electromagnetic radiation. The majority of these involve active implanted devices such as defibrillators, pacemakers, neurostimulators and infusion pumps, which can cause irreparable damage to patients' health.

Read this whitepaper to learn how you can build a better defense and put the right solutions in place to protect your healthcare organization against EMI and electromagnetic radiation.

Whether you’re opening a new location, updating your practice, or beginning a multi-office project, planning all aspects of your ideal dental space and work flow can be daunting.

Boyd Industries, an industry-leading manufacturer of dental specialty equipment and cabinetry, has created this guide to collaboration during the design process.

Learn how to build a comprehensive vision of your project, and how expert consultation can ensure success when considering the needs of a specialty practice.