Are You Measuring Productivity or Effectiveness?
Happy New Year! This week we’re sharing some key trends that will impact your 2023 goals, along with a case study on how you can set and measure those goals with your team. Enjoy!
Before we jump in… you have to check this out.
If you’re like most people, you’ve probably seen something about ChatGPT over the past few weeks. If you haven’t, stop what you’re doing and go play around with it here. I promise you’ll spend hours messing around with this.
ChatGPT is an AI language model that interacts in a conversational way. Check out this TikTok to see one of the most innovative use cases I’ve seen yet! Dr. Clifford Stermer used it to help him write denial appeals to payors. I bet we’ll see a ton of new tools built on top of this technology for revenue cycle management over the next few years.
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Deloitte Identifies 4 Key Forces Likely to Impact Health Systems in 2023
If 2022 taught us anything it’s that profit margin and staffing have been huge challenges for health systems. This is kind of a catch-22 as systems are paying top dollar for contract employees making it harder to stay profitable. We expect to see similar trends in 2023.
Deloitte identified four key forces most likely to impact health systems in 2023.
Inflation and Affordability
76 percent of respondents to Deloitte’s survey said they believe inflation and affordability of care will have a major impact on their organization in 2023. With the rising cost of living, people may delay or forego routine and preventative services altogether. Delaying care could increase the cost of care for patients long term.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation will have some impact on over 90% of health systems this year. In Deloitte’s survey, 29% said they expect it to have a major impact with 63% of respondents saying it would have a moderate impact. The biggest question mark here is how these systems will pay for it.
Shrinking Margins
Health systems are trying to recover from decreased patient volume and revenue issues caused by the pandemic, while simultaneously dealing with the increased costs of supplies and labor. Many patients are still choosing to forego non-emergency procedures while others are choosing ambulatory centers instead of hospitals to receive treatment. This is going to be especially difficult for smaller hospitals to manage. We’ll likely see many get acquired and others have to close completely.
New Payment Models and Alternative Sites of Care
Transitioning to new payment models such as value-based care was listed as the number one priority in 2023 for executives surveyed. To really thrive under a VBC arrangement, providers need to take a more proactive approach to keep patients healthy. Similarly, consumers are actively looking for more convenience and will likely search out sites of care that provide an exceptional patient experience. By taking initiative and adopting technology, remote patient monitoring (RPM) for example, health systems can shift the focus to keeping patients healthy while also providing an exceptional patient experience.
Are You Measuring Employee Effectiveness or Productivity?
In these past couple of years, we’ve seen an enormous increase in the cost of delivering healthcare. Add to that continued reductions in reimbursements, staffing shortages and increasing payor complexity - 2023 is shaping up to be a pivotal year.
Many of these challenges live outside of our control. To succeed in this environment, revenue leaders are doubling down on what they can control. In this article Kimberly Scaccia, VP of rev management at Mercyhealth, discusses how rethinking staffs effectiveness resulted in one of their largest cash collection months ever.
First, they unbundled their revenue cycle operations from their EHR. Before the move they couldn't get oversight on employee performance and productivity around specific tasks.
They had 2 main goals in doing this. First, automatically rank all outstanding tasks. Second, measure the staffs effectiveness of completing them in real time.
Automated account prioritization honed staffs attention and eliminated worklists and the cherry picking of accounts.
The organization then shifted its focus from measuring productivity (the quantity of accounts worked) to a focus that includes measuring effectiveness (the quality of work performed).
By focusing on these two goals Mercyhealth saw...
Their largest cash collection month and day in their history
Reduced it's days in AR by 55% in 1 year
Exceed it's year end cash target by 2%
Read the entire article here
Your Weekly Rundown
📖 My favorite healthcare-related book I read in 2022. Dr. Zeev Neuwirth does an incredible job explaining his vision in “Reframing Healthcare” Get the book here!
💡 3 Trends from this year’s Revenue Cycle Management Virtual Summit.
🔨 Why isn’t there a Home Depot for RPA? Check out Tarpon Health
💸 What alternative payment models work the best? Find out here.
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Thank you for sharing my article. I'm a believer that we need to share true innovation with others in order to disrupt the industry. Hope it helps others think outside the norm! Kim
Thank you for the shout out for Tarpon Health! We hope to give you more to talk about in the future.