Trent Chastain, Revenue Cycle Director, Hendricks Regional Health, shares recent strategies that have helped contain A/R Days.
What strategies have helped you better manage A/R days over the past year?
Trent Chastain: “We’ve looked at a couple of things: As a mid-sized health system, we have turnover. One of the challenges we have faced in the past with A/R days is being able to code in a timely manner. We had a lot of turnover with coders, and so we looked for a partner to be able to help us. Before we started looking at that, obviously, you look at, is that something that we can do as a health system ourselves? It's a very competitive market. In the past, we've had our coders who have worked remotely all over the United States. Keeping education where it needed to be, the quality where it needed to be, things like that was difficult. So, we partnered with a company that helped us maintain these standards, and so now we're more timely on the coding, bills get out the door faster, collections are more timely, so there's not as much follow-up, that kind of thing. So that's been a huge move for us in that space.
Another strategy is staying ahead of denials. We all have that challenge in the health systems, and how do you do that, right? Getting it right the first time and not having to touch claims more than once, or let me just sail through a clean claim rate, we've increased that, too. We formed a revenue cycle task force group within our health system and brought in leaders from clinical areas who can really make a difference in those things. Because, generally speaking, even though we control the front end and the back end, we're not the ones who do the actual scheduling, we're not the ones who actually get the pre-auths, so what can we do to help reduce the denials? We're an Epic shop, so one of the challenges we have there is Epic can only go so deep on denials, so we've partnered with a company that can help with that, that identified trends to line-item detail, which is a major improvement. So that we're not having to manually figure this out. And so that's been another thing that's really helped us get to where we need to be.
Our AR days have been the best they've ever been and past collections’ timelines. The 90-day metric is better than it's ever been. So some of those things that we've implemented over the last six to nine months have really made a difference."
