Along with champagne toasts and party poppers, the new year is also synonymous with fresh starts and blank slates. It’s the perfect time to assess where you’re at and set goals for where you want to be.
This applies on a personal level, but also a professional one as hospital finance teams constantly strive to improve revenue integrity and mitigate uncompensated care in a year plagued with growing costs, operational inefficiencies and an increase in self-pay patients as a result of Medicaid redetermination.
For most hospitals and healthcare organizations, revenue integrity means using ethical business practices and policies to achieve three critical organizational imperatives: operational efficiency, compliance, and optimal earned reimbursement/payment. An organization should keep all three at the top of its priority list, and all three should work in tandem.
Here are five New Year’s resolutions your organization can set to improve revenue integrity and reduce uncompensated care in 2024.
- Audit your current systems and solutions
What was high performing 1-2 years ago could be underperforming today. Running regular performance audits behind existing workflows will provide peace of mind that your organization is maximizing recoveries.
If you haven’t already conducted a year-end financial assessment, start the new year with one and commit to regularly scheduled performance audits. Collect and assess data on things like vendors, technology solutions, team efficiency and other workplace elements that require data for big decision making and optimal performance.
- Commit to technology updates or upgrades
The healthcare industry is ever-changing and always evolving. This causes points of failure in technology that demands continuous innovation.
What was new and exciting just a few years ago can now easily underperform. If you’ve been meaning to upgrade your existing technologies or search for new solutions, commit to doing so this year. The longer you wait, the more revenue you may be missing out on recovering.
- Invest in insurance discovery
If uncompensated care is a specific pain point you hope to tackle in 2024, start with a better insurance discovery solution. Innovative insurance discovery technology can be a huge asset for providers by helping them find and collect on self-pay, charity and bad debt accounts.
Insurance discovery is the foundation of any good revenue recovery program, and a slow or ineffective solution can be a major source of leakage. If you’re considering auditing your current process and/or confirming existing vendor efficiency, start with Office Ally’s free, no-risk Insurance Discovery assessment to prove our solution will yield higher returns for your organization.
- Monitor progress and analyze available data
While audits are a larger undertaking helpful for big decision making, regular reporting is necessary to establish patterns, assess short-term effectiveness and catch abnormalities before they become a larger problem.
This year, commit to running monthly reports on predetermined KPIs that measure the health of your revenue integrity program, including:
- Denials volume
- Coding accuracy
- Recovered revenue
- Underpayment recoveries
You can also go a step further and establish regular analytics meetings to share reports with your team and identify areas for improvement as a group.
- Work on proactivity
In this industry, the best offense is a good defense. Proactivity can take many different forms, but they all boil down to preparing for the unexpected and building your team’s confidence to take on challenges that may rise up in 2024.
You can start by educating yourself and your staff with industry-leading publications. Provide an information hub with helpful resources and required (or optional) trainings that everyone can reference and commit to updating it regularly. You can also increase productivity through automation, giving your staff more time to focus on problem solving and more profitable tasks.
Or perhaps proactivity takes on the form of implementing new and necessary technologies now - before it’s too late and you and your staff find yourself totally overwhelmed with whatever 2024 throws your way.
Preparing for 2024
As the famous quote says, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Narrowing your focus and setting manageable goals is the best way to hit the ground running.
If you’re unsure where to begin, start with Office Ally’s free Insurance Discovery assessment. With just a basic file export, our solution will identify and present missed revenue recovery opportunities.
This assessment is 100% risk-free. There is no upfront cost, and you only pay if Office Ally helps you recover revenue. We’re happy to help you kick off your 2024 goal setting and reduce your uncompensated care costs in the new year.
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