The most successful revenue cycles have deployed changes rapidly and confidently, enabling employees to continue the important work of keeping cash-strapped hospitals financially afloat.
The phrase "pandemic pivot" has quickly entered our lexicon, as we've all adjusted to a new normal of remote work, homeschooling, mask-wearing, and online meetings, seemingly overnight.
Such pandemic pivots have extended to the revenue cycle, too, and the most successful departments have deployed those changes rapidly and confidently, enabling employees to continue the important work of keeping cash-strapped hospitals financially afloat.
Here, we take a look back at the top seven revenue cycle pandemic pivots—and the strategies behind them—that HealthLeaders has covered so far this year.
Remote Revenue Cycle: Will It Ever Return to the Office?
Nearly six months after revenue cycle employees shifted to remote work because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many leaders are no longer contemplating when their teams will return to the office, but whether they'll return at all. Here, four revenue cycle leaders share how they're approaching remote work as the pandemic continues.
4 Revenue Cycle Initiatives Fast-Tracked by COVID-19
For years, revenue cycle executives have talked about modernization wants and needs. But in many healthcare organizations, a lack of time, money, or will—or all three—have stood in the way of moving forward. The COVID-19 crisis has changed that, and projects on the backburner have been implemented faster than anyone thought possible out of necessity. Instead of languishing on a wish list, projects like having a remote workforce, paperless patient communications, and electronic signatures, have suddenly come to fruition.
Amid COVID-19, It's Time to Rethink the Traditional Revenue Cycle
While COVID-19 has shined a brighter light on the flaws in the traditional revenue cycle, they've been requiring a fix for a long time. The crisis has revealed an urgent new opportunity to rethink and reimagine what the revenue cycle of the future might look like.
4 Critical Attributes of a COVID-19 Billing and Coding Workbook
A rapidly changing situation like the COVID-19 pandemic calls for a dynamic solution for tracking billing and coding changes for virtual services from different payers across multiple states. That's why revenue cycle leaders from Privia Health, a national physician-led medical group, based in Arlington, Virginia, developed an online workbook that can be updated and shared in real time to manage those changes effectively across their multistate network.
How Revenue Cycles Can Adjust to a New Normal
Northwell Health revenue cycle executives discussed with HealthLeaders two elements of what's next as they move into a new normal: Welcoming patients back and recouping revenue, and evaluating long-term remote-work options.
CareMount CFO Says COVID-19 Threw a 'Wrench' in Next-Gen ACO Plans
Accountable Care Organizations are all about assuming risk, but COVID-19 has changed what that risk-taking actually means. The pandemic has "thrown a wrench" into CMS's "planning about continuing toward value-based care," Kevin Conroy, CFO and chief population health officer at CareMount Medical in New York, told HealthLeaders. That's why he's encouraged by CMS's decision to extend its Next Generation ACO (NGACO) model through December 2021.
ED Volume Recoveries are Sluggish. That Might Not be a Bad Thing.
Emergency departments aren't recovering their lost COVID-19 volumes as quickly as outpatient and inpatient settings, according to new data from TransUnion Healthcare. On the surface, this might seem worrying, but digging more deeply into the data shows that the lost ED volume might actually signal an opportunity for hospitals. "Don't just switch everything back on once we get out of this mess to the way it was before, unless you liked it, and most people didn't," he says. "Take this opportunity to really transform and leapfrog your organization into something you want it to be."
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
