Data-driven Care Engagement & Revenue Management are key to succeed: Leaders at Becker’s Conference

The Becker’s Hospital Review 3rd Annual Health IT + Revenue Cycle Conference recently concluded after hosting a range of discussions on modern healthcare. The conference started with a keynote address by the ex-president of the US, George W. Bush. From all over the US, healthcare experts and distinguished thought leaders in the field of health IT gathered here to share useful knowledge to discuss the role of informatics, data analytics, mobile health, EMR issues, trends, and revenue cycle challenges like denials. As many as 150 speakers and 7 keynote speakers from various care organizations around the US attended the event to offer their personal insights and actionable takeaways.

Enhancing the engagement with providers and patients is priority

Many speakers focused on the need to increase engagement amongst providers and patients to advance health care delivery systems and support healthcare professionals. It was argued that patient engagement is the key to improving payment collections and the patient experience.

To quote Stuart Hanson of Change Healthcare, “They [patients] are looking for an Amazon-simple experience in their healthcare,” he said. “They want real transparency. They want to easily shop and compare and project what their costs are going to be. They want to easily understand their bills and easily make their payments.”

The discussions also entailed the many opportunities that providers can grab to improve collections as well as patient experience.

There is an urgent need to curb the growth of costs

Furthermore, the challenges faced by healthcare organizations in revenue cycle management were discussed. The trend in healthcare shows that the growth of expenses is outpacing the growth in revenues. Health IT experts gathered in Chicago proposed that hospitals can ensure adequate returns on investment by deploying data analytics and health IT projects.

For this to happen, it is crucial to have proper revenue cycle management that can not only help with denials management but also reconciliation, auditing, fraud management, etc.

Care delivery needs of organizations will change in approximately 1.5 years

Mercy ACO’s Director of Analytics, Nathan Riggle, delivered a talk on the journey of a winning collaboration between an ACO and an IT vendor. He explained that the needs of healthcare organizations change every 1.5 years; therefore, it’s crucial for providers to opt out of turnkey solutions and instead turn their mind towards a “build-operate-reiterate” platform.

He talked about how the method of care delivery is rapidly changing in a value-based world and how organizations need to opt for platforms that are flexible to accommodate care teams’ requests five years from now. Presenting with him, Innovaccer’s CEO Abhinav, also launched a platform on a similar concept, the Care Intelligence System™ and explained its various use cases at practice sites.

The four key takeaways that were most discussed throughout the conference:

1. It is important to really understand the current state of hospitals, health systems, providers, physicians, patients, and that of health IT. More importantly, understanding the attributed population’s risk.
2. To really solve the problem and get over the challenges, IT vendors should have an interactive relationship with people involved in the processes daily as they will have the answers that can bring forth the best solutions for them.
3. IT solutions must be tailor-made for the care staff and not the other way around. This means that providers need not adapt themselves to how solutions work, on the other hand, the solutions must ease the workload of providers by giving them exactly what they want.
4. Innovations in health care, like any other industry, is a continuous journey and there is always room for improvement. For a smoother journey, various data-driven initiatives were put forth.

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