Revenue cycle managers constantly search for the perfect benchmark information to compare their team's work with others.
Don't search too hard, says Michael S. Friedberg, FACHE, CHAM, associate vice president of patient access services for Apollo Health Street, a national revenue cycle solutions firm in Bloomfield, NJ.
It can be good to compare nationally or even regionally, but some of the best benchmarks are right under your roof.
Benchmark against yourself, Friedberg said in the September 22, HCPro, Inc. audio conference, "Use Patient Access Benchmarks to Improve Registration Accuracy."
Hold your team accountable. Do you sit back regularly and look at the big picture for your team rather than just put out fires?
In the audio conference, Friedberg pointed to passages in "Leadership," former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's 2002 book, as some great examples of holding staff members accountable.
Guiliani met with the leaders of each of NYC's police precincts once a week, reviewing crime numbers. If there were a rise in certain crimes, the mayor asked why and what the respective leader was doing about it.
Giuliani built accountability into New York city government. You can build it into your revenue cycle team.
Dunn Memorial Hospital in Bedford, IN, is doing it now.
Stephanie Smithson, CHAM, the patient accounts director, says the facility implemented best practice key performance indicators (KPIs) for the entire revenue cycle. KPIs are metrics that illustrate how to improve your revenue cycle.
Dunn's patient access benchmarks include:
- 2% or less error rate at time of billing
- 95% pre-registration rate
Dunn creates action plans for areas below benchmark, Smithson says. Dunn also implemented ED point-of-service (POS) collections.
"ED POS collections is a new area for us, and we are actively working through the issues with ED Nursing Management to resolve," Smithson says. "We are actively using our performance matrix to assign shifts and for evaluations."
Each revenue cycle team reports numbers monthly to the hospital finance committee and the hospital board. A core group meets weekly to complete and report outstanding issues for the entire revenue cycle.
What has the revenue-cycle-wide initiative done for Dunn?
- Allows staff members to meet and interact on all points of the revenue cycle
- Educates staff members how each area interacts within the revenue cycle and what issues they have
- Gives team leaders a voice and chance to showcase their team's improvement
- Exposes leaders to other leaders' strategy on handling problems within their own areas