In these days of increasing bad debt, depleted cash-on-hand and narrow margins, health systems need to streamline their revenue cycle operations, and that often means outsourcing services or automating processes that were previously done by hand.
For instance, the Baylor Health Care System, based in Dallas, Texas, recently chose an outside vendor to manage the automated processing of nearly 300,000 invoices per year across its 12-hospital system.
The not-for-profit health system signed a deal with Brainware, Inc., an Ashburn, Va.-based provider of intelligent data capture and enterprise search
solutions.
BHCS will use the company’s intelligent data capture solution to automatically extract and validate header and line-item data from invoices.
By automating tasks like invoicing, “hospital and healthcare clients can redirect money that would have otherwise been lost towards the latest in medical technology and healthcare delivery systems,” said Carl Mergele, CEO at Brainware.
The University of California San Diego Medical Center also recently contracted with a third-party vendor to improve revenue cycle operations.
UCSD hired Cymetrix, an Irvine, Calif.-based company specializing in revenue cycle management services for hospitals, to take over the management of A/R for the medical center.
Cymetrix touts its services, such as online claim-status capabilities and performance monitoring tools, as useful specifically for hospital patient accounts departments.
The UCSD Medical Center comprises the UC San Diego Medical Center as well as UC San Diego Thornton Hospital in La Jolla, Calif., the Moores UCSD Cancer Center and the UCSD Shiley Eye Center.
Another West Coast health system, Providence Health & Services, a 27-hospital nonprofit health system, based in Renton, Wash., has jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon, inking a deal for primary early placement outsourcedrevenue cycle services for its California facilities.
The health system signed a deal with the Dallas-based company PHNS for a range of revenue cycle services for its five California hospitals, said Jan Grankowski, regional director of revenue cycle management at Providence-California.
PHNS offers receivables management, business office and accounts receivable services, and interim revenue cycle services to hospitals. The company’s areas of expertise include managed care, Medicare, Medicaid, commercial insurance, workers’ compensation and self-pay accounts.
The perfect fit, apparently, for Providence-California, which wants help tracking the progress of claims and collections and managing accounts receivable. In addition to its hospitals, Providence operates 35 non-acute care facilities, physician clinics and a health plan.