Client News Coverage

Readers Write: The Future State of AI and Automation in the Revenue Cycle

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, December 04, 2024.

Like many heavily regulated industries, healthcare has seen limited progress towards the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, despite the enormous potential they hold for improving productivity, accuracy, care access, and the bottom line. Much of that promise comes from use cases that span the revenue cycle management (RCM) continuum, where legacy automation tools are already having a positive impact through activities like patient reminders, insurance verification, coding, and claims status transactions.

Today, generative AI (GenAI) is poised to upend, in a positive way, healthcare’s approach to front- and back-end financial operations. It has the potential to re-imagine the massive volumes of historical and real-time revenue-related data that is flowing through RCM departments and create entirely new approaches to optimize revenue and minimize financial risk.

HIStalk»

Optimizing Patient Access Services

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, November 13, 2024.

Efficient patient access operations are paramount for healthcare provider organizations to thrive in today’s tumultuous financial landscape. Inefficiencies created by outdated, time-consuming, and cost-intensive patient access and financial clearance operations create delays in the patient’s journey from initial contact to care access—which in turn contribute to revenue leakage that chip away at the bottom line and put an organization’s financial stability at greater risk.

Streamlining the patient access process not only eliminates those delays, but it helps ensure patients’ financial security and timely access to necessary medical services. However, many provider organizations are struggling to improve patient access operations, thanks to chronic staffing shortages, rising patient volumes, and more complex prior authorization requirements. As a result, they are falling short of core financial clearance benchmarks.

Health IT Answers»

Automation and Reimagining Revenue Integrity

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, September 25, 2024.

Revenue integrity has become harder to maintain as audits grow in volume and complexity. Payers are increasing scrutiny and regulatory agencies are reinforcing fraud mitigation. Navigating this evolving terrain requires a reimagined, automated approach to billing compliance, coding, and HIM, optimizing accuracy and efficiency to protect revenue.

We sat down with Dana Finnegan, Director of Market Strategy with MDaudit, to discuss what’s behind the scenes of reimagining revenue integrity and the role automation can play in achieving success.

Electronic Health Reporter»

Trending NOW: Conrad Coopersmith, General Manager, AGS Health

Posted in Client News Coverage on Monday, September 23, 2024.

What's Trending NOW is the intersection of artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, and professional services in medical coding. Host Shahid Shah is joined by with Conrad Coopersmith, General Manager, AGS Health, a company focused on revenue cycle management in healthcare. Conrad shares insights of the use of technology and AI in the coding automation journey.

Healthcare NOW Radio»

AI Advances Bring RCM To an Inflection Point

Posted in Client News Coverage on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.

Various forms of automation have long been present within healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM). However, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought the industry to a significant inflection point, where the use cases for AI tools are expanding as rapidly as their capabilities.

We sat down with Thomas Thatapudi, chief information officer of AGS Health, to discuss the current and future state of AI in RCM and what healthcare organizations need to know about effectively integrating it into workflows.

Electronic Health Reporter»

Enhancing Interoperability and Data Sharing with Innovative Technologies and Standards

Posted in Client News Coverage on Tuesday, September 10, 2024.

There are a lot of components to consider and talk about in regards to interoperability and data sharing. The inventive ideas and possibilities of where it can go and what it could do, the rules and regulations surrounding this area of healthcare, the privacy and concerns, etc. Today we are going to focus on the innovative technologies and standards that are currently being employed to make our dreams of a better system of interoperability and data sharing a reality.

We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask, what innovative technologies and standards are being employed to enhance interoperability and data sharing, and how are these advancements influencing the accessibility and quality of healthcare services? The following are their answers.

Healthcare IT Today»

Autonomous Coding and Data Integrity

Posted in Client News Coverage on Tuesday, September 10, 2024.

Accurate coding is fundamental to data integrity. Computer-assisted and autonomous coding are helping.

A crucial aspect of health care is data integrity—ensuring that health information is high quality, accurate, and complete. Not only does this information affect the immediate care patients receive, but it also can influence their future health care. Additionally, high-quality data can be integral in implementing positive public-health efforts and reducing health care costs.

For The Record»

Harnessing Design Systems to Advance EHR Accessibility and Digital Health Equity

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, September 04, 2024.

Among the many weaknesses laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic was the lamentable state of web accessibility. According to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility (BOIA), 90% of US adults said the internet was “essential” during the pandemic. However, more than 97% of homepages tested by BOIA in 2021 had identifiable issues preventing them from conforming with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard for digital accessibility.

This accessibility disconnect puts people with disabilities at a significant disadvantage; unable to schedule vaccines, communicate with their providers, or schedule appointments. Correcting this is one reason why web accessibility—declared a human right by the United Nations in 2016—has been elevated to a high-priority social determinant of health (SDOH).

Health IT Answers»

The Challenges and Barriers in Standardized and Secure Data Exchange

Posted in Client News Coverage on Tuesday, September 03, 2024.

While having different choices and options is an important part of life, some levels of standardization are easier, if not necessary. For example, we all have a favorite gas station based on where we live and what our price and snack preferences are, this is an area where having different choices is great. However, no matter what gas station you visit, all gas pumps have the same standard gas options with standardized octane levels, this standardization makes our lives so much easier and is crucial to having our cars work. In healthcare, being able to pick and choose which vendors, third parties, and technologies to use in our organization is very important. This freedom of choice allows us to customize our organizations to better serve our patients and staff. However, all of these different systems make it difficult to securely and reliably exchange data. Creating a standard for data exchange would make our lives significantly easier, but creating that standard isn’t going to be easy. Exchanging data isn’t something that we can merely measure out and agree on set parameters as we can for octane levels in gas. There are a lot of factors in play that make this much more complicated, but what exactly are those factors?

Healthcare IT Today»

The Role of the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA) in Facilitating Seamless Data Sharing Among Healthcare Entities

Posted in Client News Coverage on Friday, August 30, 2024.

High-quality, reliable data is crucial to getting most things done in healthcare, especially for healthcare interoperability. However, having the data alone isn’t enough – we need to be able to share our data between healthcare entities. Without having the same data sets, how else are our organizations and different healthcare entities supposed to work together seamlessly? We’ve made some great strides in improving interoperability, in no small part due to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).

So let’s take a moment to check in and examine the current state of healthcare – how is interoperability in healthcare advancing and what role does TEFCA play in facilitating seamless data sharing among healthcare entities? We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today for their insights into this question, the following is what they had to share.

Healthcare IT Today»

Recommendations for Capturing Social Determinants

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, August 14, 2024.

A patient’s risk within social determinant of health (SDOH) domains is typically assessed by social care and healthcare professionals through either conversation, standard screening questionnaires, or validated testing instruments. The challenge is the lack of consensus on which specific domains should be assessed for patients – and how they should be assessed.

Electronic Health Reporter»

Improving Revenue Cycle Management with True AI and Machine Learning

Posted in Client News Coverage on Friday, August 09, 2024.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are two vast topics of discussion as we work on implementing these tools into a multitude of areas in the healthcare space. So lets narrow that down a bit and focus on Revenue Cycle Management. We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community and asked them – where is true AI and machine learning being used to improve revenue cycle management? The following are their answers.

Healthcare IT Today»

Proactive Decision Making in Revenue Cycle Management with Data Analytics and Business Intelligence Tools

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, August 07, 2024.

Making well-informed decisions is very important in the healthcare space, especially for areas that are necessary for your organization to function, like revenue cycle management (RCM). The best way to make sure that we have all of the information we need to make the best possible decisions is through data analytics and business intelligence tools. To get more insights on how these tools impact RCM, we reached out to our talented Healthcare IT Today Community to ask them – how does the integration of data analytics and business intelligence tools contribute to proactive decision-making in revenue cycle management, and what key performance indicators are being monitored to assess financial health? The following is what they had to share.

Healthcare IT Today»

Leveraging Advanced Technologies and Automation in Revenue Cycle Management

Posted in Client News Coverage on Wednesday, August 07, 2024.

One of the leading causes of burnout in the healthcare industry is the overwhelming amount of tasks that need to be completed without nearly enough time to do them. And unfortunately, this is a problem that only compounds on itself. The more that you have to do, the more overworked and overwhelmed you get, which means you start to make mistakes and therefore have more work that needs to be done as you now need to go back and re-do your previous work, and the cycle continues until something breaks. This is why implementing advanced technologies and automation into healthcare is crucial for your staff’s and your organization’s wellbeing. So what does that look like for revenue cycle management?

Healthcare IT Today»

Strengthening Healthcare Resilience: A Vendor Checklist for Data Security and Business Continuity

Posted in Client News Coverage on Friday, July 26, 2024.

In the aftermath of the cyber-attack on Change Healthcare by the BlackCat ransomware group, a renewed interest has emerged in protecting operations and ensuring contingencies are in place.  For impacted providers, the financial fallout from the attack is estimated at $500 million to $1 billion per day and climbing, driving home the fact that business continuity is everything in the aftermath of a cyber-attack.

Presently, many healthcare organizations remain in limbo after the attack, which exposed 6 terabytes of sensitive patient data, without access to important services such as claim processing for prescriptions, and daily workflows around auditing and reporting. While Change is working to fully restore the more than 100 applications across pharmacy, medical record, clinical, dental, patient engagement, and payment services it was forced to disconnect, recovery will be a long, slow, painful process for all

HIT Consultant»