18 of the best snippets from the 2020 Crowe Healthcare Summit

“The closer that [you] can align your reserve model with your business today, the easier it is to pivot down the road.” 

– Ryan Herr, Senior Manager, Crowe 
From “Net revenue modeling through and beyond a crisis”

“What we’ve seen with COVID is it’s not just a payer mix change; it’s a pretty significant service mix change.” 

– Bryan Rector, Partner, Crowe 
From “COVID-19 net revenue modeling and budgeting considerations”

“Our competence has grown over the duration of this pandemic and we think we're battle-hardened. Unless there's a severe set of recurrences, we think we'll be able to sustain our operations going forward.”

– Dennis Dahlen, CFO, Mayo Clinic
From the opening keynote, “After the crisis: A leader’s guide to financial recovery”

“As profitability for organizations declines, the subtle pressure increases [on finance] to be more aggressive with reporting revenue and decreasing reserves. . . . I am not suggesting that there is a conscious effort toward inaccurate accounting or reporting. But it is critical to keep reserve rates within acceptable audit corridors.”

– Warren Beck, Senior Manager, Crowe
From “Building and maintaining executive confidence in net revenue”

“You definitely want to make sure that the leverage that your practice has [in the market] is being compensated by market rates from your payers.”

– Eric Busch, Senior Manager, Crowe
From “Analyzing net revenue for physicians”

“Everything hinges around the financial assistance policy, as it’s ultimately the guide to being able to include or not include transactions for S-10 reporting.”

– Nick West, Manager, Crowe
From “Navigating an S-10 Audit? Prepare an effective plan to maximize uncompensated care cost and build a bullet-proof defense”

“The goals and objectives of the two . . . functions [revenue cycle and finance], . . . and really their expertise, [are] very different and, therefore, there’s some natural friction between the two. . . . A lot of that can be alleviated by doing a better job up front of . . . opening the lines of communication between those two functions to be able to better understand each other’s groups and better understand the actions that we’re taking to accomplish our goals.”

– Ryan Herr, Senior Manager, Crowe
From “Developing a strategic partnership between revenue cycle and finance”

“For now [the payer-specific negotiated prices that hospitals have to report on their Medicare cost reports apply only to] Medicare Advantage plans. But I fully expect that the cost reports will have to include [negotiated prices from commercial health plans] at some point [in the future].”

– Liz Elias, Attorney, Hall Render
From “Hot topics in reimbursement”

“Simply making people resource cuts won’t work as a long-term strategy for balancing margin and quality of care.”

– Natalie Storm, Senior Manager, Crowe
From “Operating in the new normal of healthcare: Cash management and cost efficiency”

“When you overlay [finance] functions that are prime for automation with where there are inefficiencies, that’s where you have the greatest opportunities to get a large benefit from an automation program.”

– Tracey Coyne, Partner, Crowe
From “Journey to automation: How automation can improve your finance function performance”

“We must not compromise on excellence. Science, evidence, and pragmatism should be informing our decisions. We must remain flexible and innovative in the face of rapidly evolving circumstances. And we need to be inclusive and equitable on our solutions.”

– Kathleen McGrow, Chief Nursing Information Officer, Microsoft
From day two keynote, “The Intelligent healthcare experience: A virtual tour”

“The executive team is ultimately responsible for the success [of a patient accounting system conversion], and [its] key responsibilities are to remove barriers along the way and hold vendors accountable [for] their commitments.”

– Tim Frain, Manager, Crowe
From “Modeling and monitoring net revenue during patient accounting system conversions”

“All existing data and visual assets or dashboards . . . need to go under some form of periodic review to determine the continued efficacy of them.”

– Alex Garrison, Senior Manager, Crowe
From “Creating a data analytics strategy using Crowe RCA”

“It all starts with questioning the conventions on how you do the work that you do today. . . . It’s diagnosing the process and where the process isn’t meeting the expectations of the organization and then redesigning the solutions. . . . Don’t disrupt it. Reinvent it.”

– A.J. Hanna, Vice President, Client Advocacy, Sykes Enterprises
From “RPA: Delivering speed to value in challenging times”

“The list of potential buyers has shortened significantly because cash flow, as we know, has become a significant issue for a lot of organizations.”

– Colleen Hall, Healthcare Revenue Cycle Leader, Crowe
From “Emerging trends in 2020 healthcare”

“It just keeps on rolling. The [Medicare area] wage index never goes away. There’s always something to be aware of.”

– Dave Andrzejewski, Senior Manager, Crowe
From “2020 area wage index update and strategies”

“Data is the new oil. . . . However, the oil is not quite as valuable as it should be.”

– Todd Crosslin, Head of Healthcare and Life Sciences, Snowflake
From “How Snowflake powers Crowe and your organization”

“All of our successful healthcare solutions at Crowe have been the result of collaboration with our client community”

– Derek Bang, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer, Crowe
From the closing keynote, “The power of community”

Actionable insights

These snippets are a sample of the insights shared by the presenters at the 2020 Crowe Healthcare Summit.

What other wisdom did the presenters impart? Please click on the session links to listen to a rebroadcast of the entire session to find out.

Or, contact Crowe directly to get our take on helping drive performance improvement in the finance operations of your hospital, health system, or medical practice.