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HFMA Day 2: Blisters in the Sun
Phil Betbeze, for HealthLeaders News, June 27, 2007
Welcome to Day Two of HFMA's Annual National Institute.
Blisters are forming on my feet, but so far, I'm still ambulatory. Part of it is my fault. My wife and I took a trip to the San Diego Zoo last night in lieu of dinner which necessitated a lot of additional walking. One lion roared at us, perhaps thinking we were dinner. The lion notwithstanding, lots of the animals were going to bed by the time we got there, but the nocturnal ones were really getting busy, including the koalas. And if you're going to see animals sleeping at the zoo, a most impressive sight is a giant panda asleep in a tree. My wife's favorite exhibit: the pygmy hippo sharing a pen with a crocodile. Croc seemed less than interested in messing with the hippo, even a slightly smaller one like the pygmy.
On to healthcare finance. More sessions today. I'm skipping around, on the hunt for story ideas, as usual. It's hard to flit around these sessions and get good story ideas because you're often only hearing part of the story. My wish as a member of the media for future HFMA national institutes: Shorter classes and more session time periods. You always feel like you're missing something (and you probably are) if you're trying to hit at least two classes in the one hour and 45 minute sessions, of which there are only two each day. How about four session periods each day, each 45 minutes long, with fewer classes to choose from during each period. I realize most of the members are trying to get continuing education credit which might require these marathon sessions, but one can always dream.
This morning, I attended a class presented by UPMC's Linda Zang and Karen O'Malley, where they talked about how UPMC built a system to improve their point-of-sale collections. In UPMC's case, even back in 2002 when most POS collections consisted of collecting $10 copays, that meant a lot of money. Millions of dollars, in fact. Quote of the day from Linda: "When it comes to collecting money from consumers, we're not that much different from Wal-Mart of Circuit City."
Where they are different is that UPMC couldn't take payment from across nearly two dozen different lines of business, so patients might pay in one place and still get billed from another because the systems weren't talking to each other. That's only one of just about as many challenges. Moral of the story, says O'Malley, "Although we professed to be, we did not look act or function like one unified healthcare system."
That's all changed now, and perhaps I'll report more on this later as I get more details on the story. In short, all this heavy lifting to integrate payments not only from patients but from renters, vendors and other sources not only brought immediate revenue improvements, but drastically decreased complaints from patients and others who had paid UPMC but were frustrated that one arm of the system didn't seem to know that the other arm had been paid in full. As this case study represents, quality sometimes means more than just clinical excellence.
Speaking of clinical quality, I attended the second half of a very interesting session by John Byrnes, MD, senior vice president of system quality at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, MI. His premise was that in addition to all the benefits to patient care from a clinical quality improvement exercise, the system can also benefit financially. And this project brought in big dollars, folks, to the tune of between $3 million and $4 million a year for Spectrum. The system's quality improvement program focused on eliminating practice variation and complications buried in the service lines.
"Practice patterns, buried in a service line, can drive big savings," he says. And the lesson? "Complications around your high-volume procedures are costing you a ton of money." The bottom line for Spectrum was having good quality data on the physicians and fostering competition among them to reduce practice variation and thus drive clinical improvements. Not just quality for quality's sake, as admirable a goal as that might be.
Well that's a window into Day two. Looking forward to tomorrow, where we're scheduled to kick off the day by hearing from quality and satisfaction guru Quint Studer.
Here's to happy feet, as hopeless as that toast might seem.
Philip Betbeze is finance editor with HealthLeaders magazine. He can be reached at pbetbeze@healthleadersmedia.com.
Blisters are forming on my feet, but so far, I'm still ambulatory. Part of it is my fault. My wife and I took a trip to the San Diego Zoo last night in lieu of dinner which necessitated a lot of additional walking. One lion roared at us, perhaps thinking we were dinner. The lion notwithstanding, lots of the animals were going to bed by the time we got there, but the nocturnal ones were really getting busy, including the koalas. And if you're going to see animals sleeping at the zoo, a most impressive sight is a giant panda asleep in a tree. My wife's favorite exhibit: the pygmy hippo sharing a pen with a crocodile. Croc seemed less than interested in messing with the hippo, even a slightly smaller one like the pygmy.
On to healthcare finance. More sessions today. I'm skipping around, on the hunt for story ideas, as usual. It's hard to flit around these sessions and get good story ideas because you're often only hearing part of the story. My wish as a member of the media for future HFMA national institutes: Shorter classes and more session time periods. You always feel like you're missing something (and you probably are) if you're trying to hit at least two classes in the one hour and 45 minute sessions, of which there are only two each day. How about four session periods each day, each 45 minutes long, with fewer classes to choose from during each period. I realize most of the members are trying to get continuing education credit which might require these marathon sessions, but one can always dream.
This morning, I attended a class presented by UPMC's Linda Zang and Karen O'Malley, where they talked about how UPMC built a system to improve their point-of-sale collections. In UPMC's case, even back in 2002 when most POS collections consisted of collecting $10 copays, that meant a lot of money. Millions of dollars, in fact. Quote of the day from Linda: "When it comes to collecting money from consumers, we're not that much different from Wal-Mart of Circuit City."
Where they are different is that UPMC couldn't take payment from across nearly two dozen different lines of business, so patients might pay in one place and still get billed from another because the systems weren't talking to each other. That's only one of just about as many challenges. Moral of the story, says O'Malley, "Although we professed to be, we did not look act or function like one unified healthcare system."
That's all changed now, and perhaps I'll report more on this later as I get more details on the story. In short, all this heavy lifting to integrate payments not only from patients but from renters, vendors and other sources not only brought immediate revenue improvements, but drastically decreased complaints from patients and others who had paid UPMC but were frustrated that one arm of the system didn't seem to know that the other arm had been paid in full. As this case study represents, quality sometimes means more than just clinical excellence.
Speaking of clinical quality, I attended the second half of a very interesting session by John Byrnes, MD, senior vice president of system quality at Spectrum Health in Grand Rapids, MI. His premise was that in addition to all the benefits to patient care from a clinical quality improvement exercise, the system can also benefit financially. And this project brought in big dollars, folks, to the tune of between $3 million and $4 million a year for Spectrum. The system's quality improvement program focused on eliminating practice variation and complications buried in the service lines.
"Practice patterns, buried in a service line, can drive big savings," he says. And the lesson? "Complications around your high-volume procedures are costing you a ton of money." The bottom line for Spectrum was having good quality data on the physicians and fostering competition among them to reduce practice variation and thus drive clinical improvements. Not just quality for quality's sake, as admirable a goal as that might be.
Well that's a window into Day two. Looking forward to tomorrow, where we're scheduled to kick off the day by hearing from quality and satisfaction guru Quint Studer.
Here's to happy feet, as hopeless as that toast might seem.
Philip Betbeze is finance editor with HealthLeaders magazine. He can be reached at pbetbeze@healthleadersmedia.com.
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