PROVO, UT – Utah’s largest independent physician group has opted to overhaul its revenue cycle in search of better, more efficient returns on investment.
Central Utah Clinic, which employs 96 physicians and generates about $170 million in gross annual revenue, will contract with MedSynergies, a Dallas-based RCM supplier.
MedSynergies offers a custom revenue cycle implementation available in five discrete packages.
“We started out as a company doing full RCM services,” said Frank Marshall, chief operations officer for MedSynergies. “What we’ve found is that there are larger organizations out there who could use some of the pieces that we’ve developed. We’ve taken the whole bundled thing and broken it into discrete services that are sold separately.”
The five RCM services offered are claims production and statements, payment posting, claims intelligence, selfpay collection cycle and accounts receivable follow-up. Central Utah Clinic will implement the payment posting, claims intelligence and selfpay solutions.
The system “brings some new technologies to our existing tools to make us able to be much more effective and efficient with RCM,” said Scott Barlow, chief executive officer of Central Utah Clinic.
Barlow said full implementation will take about three months. “We’re estimating a little over $1.2 million in costs tied to it.”
Facing the scheduled 9.9 percent cut to physician reimbursement for Medicare services in 2008, Barlow said Central Utah Clinic hopes the solutions will offset negative changes. The clinic does 42 percent of its business with Medicare patients, he noted.
MedSynergies has 42 accounts with about 2,200 physicians nationwide that use some or all of the revenue suite. Marshall said one of the strengths of the RCM service is that it allows organizations to zone in on their metrics, such as accounts receivable days, unreconciled appointments and past rates.
“The payment posting platform and self-pay collection cycle are the easiest ROI because it starts out as purely an expense arbitrage, but those functions lead into the claims intelligence and expense arbitrage and top-line revenue growth,” Marshall said.