Archive for: Patient access
Hospital’s ’what if’ scenario becomes reality
The patient access team at Skagit Valley Hospital has many goals as it works through this economic recession: Sustain morale, maintain trust, minimize criticism, and acknowledge success.
Michele Hill, CHAM, patient access manager at the Mount Vernon, WA, facility, knows it's not easy considering what the hospital faces:
- Federal and state budget cuts
- Change in payer mix
- Increased charity care requests
- RAC audits
"Our facility, like many others, is facing significant challenges during this time of economic downturn," Hill says.
Read the full story.
ED wait times drop slightly; patient satisfaction rises
Despite a recession and continued crowding, a new study shows that the average wait time in the nation's emergency departments fell by two minutes in 2008 to 4:03. Even with the long waits, Press Ganey's Emergency Department Pulse Report 2009 finds that patient satisfaction rose in 2008, continuing a five-year improvement trend.
Leigh Vinocur, MD, on the emergency physician faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, says she's not surprised that patients leave the ED satisfied.
"First of all, they probably can't get in to see a primary care doctor," says Vinocur, who is also a national spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians. "And when you go to a doctor's office, he decides you could need a CT scan or a neurologist and you're waiting another few weeks for a referral.
"So, even though people are waiting four and five hours in the ER, they have an idea they are going to have a diagnosis when they leave. That doesn't always happen. But we can do a lot of procedures and things while you are there to get closer to the diagnosis," she says.
Read the full story by HealthLeaders Media’s John Commins.
Patient access leaders must remain flexible in difficult economy
Sometimes, your health information managers need to code. And your patient access managers need to register patients.
In these tough economic times, your hospital staff members should be ready for different roles on any given day. No one is immune to change.
At Albany (NY) Medical Center, managers in the patient access department are prepared to handle staff shortages.
During a recent string of illnesses and consecutives days with short staffs, department leaders took off their managers' hats and got on the frontline to register patients.
"The leadership team are working managers, much like any other patient access area," says Cathy Pallozzi, CHAM, patient access director at Albany Medical, noting the staff recently experienced colds and GI, which sprang the managers to action. "So the managers are on the front end, as well as the associate director. If I am needed, I will be on the front end as well."
Read the full story.
Tip: Analyze your registration process
Patients typically arrive at the hospital as planned, urgent, or emergent admissions, and are registered in different ways. Errors made during the registration process can have a negative impact all the way to throughput and discharge planning. For this reason, the hospital may want to consider a performance improvement project to identify if there are registration errors, the types and frequency of these errors, and when they occur. For example, do errors occur more often on emergency admission on the night shift? What types of errors are they? Are they duplicate medical record numbers, errors in Social Security numbers, or the spelling of patient names? Any of these issues will have an impact on patient safety, discharge planning, and even billing or denials.
Editor’s note: This tip comes from HCPro’s newest training resource for hospital case managers—Core Skills for Hospital Case Managers: A Training Toolkit for Effective Outcomes by Beverly Cunningham, MS, RN, and Toni Cesta PhD, RN, FAAN, available now at HCMarketplace.com.
Patient access teams get financially smart in a tight economy
Hospitals can't escape layoffs these days, and they're not adding many jobs any time soon.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Friday say hospitals added only 300 payroll jobs across the entire nation, compared to 16,800 jobs in May 2008, and 8,700 jobs in May 2007.
So what are hospitals doing about it, especially on the front end where accurate registrations and upfront collections can mean the difference between a denial and a full return on a patient bill?
They are getting smarter, more technologically savvy, and analyzing their payer mix and what each entity requires.
Read the full story by HealthLeaders Media's Dom Nicastro.
Discuss patient financial information early in the hospital stay
The Patient Friendly Billing Project, a collaborative effort spearheaded by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), has developed guidelines for care providers to help inform patients of their financial liability as early as possible during a hospital stay.
The guidelines describe these discussions as an opportunity to help patients make informed decisions about their care. Such discussions also help patients learn about payment alternatives, such as Medicaid or charity care, and begin the application process as early as possible.
Early discussions of treatment and financial options, says the HFMA, increases the likelihood that providers will receive sufficient payment. This helps ensure they will be able to continue providing high quality care.
Source: Healthcare Financial Management Association
Revenue Cycle Institute posts free ABN Audit Preparation tool
Help ensure your facility properly obtains ABNs from patients for Medicare noncovered services with this auditing checklist.
Click here to download the sample ABN Audit Preparation tool.
Editor’s note: This sample tool is excerpted from the Medical Necessity Training Toolkit, published by HCPro, Inc.
Benchmarks in patient access accuracy
This Patient Access Resource Center’s quarterly benchmarking report is designed specifically for patient access managers and finance professionals. This report is based on the results of a survey in which we asked your peers to provide information about their registration accuracy rates.
We wanted to compare the results from our previous survey on registration accuracy back in May 2007.
Here, the good news is that more of your peers are tracking accuracy rates than they were 19 months ago. About 25% of managers said they did not track accuracy rates in May 2007, but only 3% say they do not track rates today.
We suspect that is a direct effect of the CMS Medicare Recovery Audit Contractors (RAC) program, which began its nationwide rollout. The three-year demonstration project collected more than $900 million in overpayments.
