Looking to Automate in 2023? Banner Health Rev Cycle Leader Has Advice

As 2022 ends and revenue cycle leaders start to look toward 2023, technology is at the top of the to do list for a lot of leaders.

Adding in automation can be complicated, and revenue cycle leaders should look toward their peers when looking to seamlessly implement new technology.

From perfecting your workflows to collaborating with other departments, there are a few keys to success that revenue cycle leaders should keep in mind when looking to automate processes.

Jamie Davis, executive director of revenue cycle management at Banner Health, spoke with HealthLeaders about Banner Health's journey in implementing the use of AI, automating its revenue cycle management, and lessons learned from taking on such a large task.

"In full transparency, we tried to run first, and then we fell. We realized we needed to slow down a little bit, which was a great lesson learned," Davis said. "I think anyone who is trying to be innovative has those horror stories where something worked out really well in the boardroom and not so much in real life."

Banner Health has 30 hospitals, and the appropriate workflows weren't aligning. "So, we automated a dysfunctional workflow, and it ended up being more cumbersome to utilize the machine learning. It was a good learning experience—we did the fail-fast theory."

After stepping back, realigning its strategic planning, and partnering with IT, Banner's deployment process started to turn around.

"We ended up creating hierarchal scoring for all of the automation that we wanted to consider. On one side, we have the benefits: for example, net revenues, compliance, or full-time employee re-allocation. We would then weigh those scores and compare them to the complexity of the build: for example, how many process variants does it have? How many systems are in there?" Davis shared.

After gathering those scores, Banner would use a classic grid to determine automation that was low-effort, low-return, and high-effort, high-return. This hierarchical approach made all the difference for them.

"Once we did that, we applied a continuous improvement team member to have oversight and to help be that subject matter expert in the revenue cycle to make sure we aren't recreating core processes. And from there, our automation just went gangbusters," Davis said.