11 insights from the 2021 Crowe healthcare revenue cycle virtual symposium

The 2021 Crowe healthcare revenue cycle virtual symposium featured seven educational sessions and a dozen presenters over the nearly daylong event. The theme of the event, the industry’s first all-virtual revenue cycle symposium, was “bringing the future into focus.”

These 11 insights culled from the seven sessions capture the theme of the event and offer practical advice or lessons to inspire attendees as they begin reengineering their revenue cycle operations to achieve greater performance now and in the future. Collectively, the insights tell a story of a healthcare financial discipline that must revolutionize itself to better meet the needs of healthcare organizations and the patients they serve. Each includes a link to the relevant session, which can be viewed on demand.

What the Fire Ignited: How Life’s Worst Helped Me Achieve My Best

Now it’s time to stop looking in the past and to focus on the future. The fog of COVID is lifting, and it’s time for focus.

Colleen Hall

Managing Principal, Healthcare,

Crowe

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Insights, trends, and strategies for revenue cycle teams of tomorrow

This is the perfect time for innovative revenue cycle leaders. But if you are a leader who needs to see a person sitting in a seat, good luck recruiting talent. People don’t want that anymore. I have phenomenal employees that do not live in Nashville, and I am OK with that because they’re creating and innovating and pushing my revenue cycle. And I don’t care where they’re sitting.

Heather Dunn

Vice President, Revenue Cycle Services,

Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Assume that none of what you’re doing now is [revenue cycle] best practice. I would throw it all out the window.

Ben Reigle

Founder

RCM Leaders Forum

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Revenue cycle automation success stories: UnityPoint Health

We needed to get our core solid before we were ready to move into the automation stage. We did not jump when all of the buzzwords, such as RPA, AI, bots, machine learning, and others became popular. We embrace innovation, but we are also thoughtful. It needs to be at the right time and the right place to get the right results. We are not looking to just check a box. We did our revenue cycle automations to improve our performance.

Renee Rasmussen

Vice President, Revenue Cycle,

UnityPoint Health

With each of our targeted automations, we built a business case. Within each of those business cases, we defined our requirements and specific parameters. This step is really important, as it clearly defines for everybody involved exactly what we’re automating, what steps we’re taking to deliver that automation, and the type of automation we’re using.

Dennis Shirley

Executive Director of Patient Financial Services,

UnityPoint Health

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Watch "Revenue cycle automation success stories: UnityPoint Health" on demand, and access the presentation slides.

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How automation is transforming accounts receivable management

By automating your accounts receivable management, you’re freeing up your labor to focus on the right accounts at the right time with the right people.

Chad Peters

Senior Manager, Healthcare Consulting,

Crowe

Ultimately the main question becomes what does the process look like to get from manually working everything to potentially utilizing some automation and following that craft-standardization-systemization-automation approach.

Alex Boone

Manager, Healthcare Consulting,

Crowe

Debit balances represent potential cash, but not all debit balances are created equal. It’s timing and resources versus opportunities.

Chad Oakley

Manager, Healthcare Consulting,

Crowe

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Healthcare in focus: How trends in policy, technology, and the healthcare market will reshape the industry over the next 5 years

Digital health is healthcare. Digital health has become so intertwined with traditional care and in many cases has replaced it. To consider digital health and traditional healthcare as separate entities is akin to considering physical banking and online banking as separate entities. Today we consider those as one and the same. It’s the same for digital health.

Andrew Sudimack

Manager, Healthcare Consulting,

Crowe

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Watch "Healthcare in focus: How trends in policy, technology, and the healthcare market will reshape the industry over the next 5 years" on demand, and access the presentation slides.

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Performance integrity: A smarter approach to performance monitoring, decision-making, and progress tracking

There is no doubt that the investment in data has been there. What has been lacking is investment in the time and resources that it takes to digest all of that new data.

Matt Szaflarski

Senior Manager, Healthcare Consulting,

Crowe

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Laser-focus on the road ahead: Tying it all together in a next-gen revenue cycle

Patience is one thing that I’m not seeing a lot of anymore by CFOs with other kinds of operating models. They’ve been through some really challenging changes over the past year, and it’s hard to go back to an incremental mindset for performance improvement.

Brian Sanderson

Principal, Healthcare Consulting,

Crowe

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What pearls of wisdom from the 2021 Crowe healthcare revenue cycle virtual symposium continue to stick with you? We’re sure there are many more than the 11 highlighted here.

We’re also confident that you’ll be generating your own insights as you reinvent your revenue cycle operations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that forever changed how we deliver and finance healthcare services.

You also can share your revenue cycle insights in person with your peers by attending the 2021 Crowe Healthcare Summit in Denver or virtually, Sept. 20-23. Registration for this year’s summit is now open. We hope to see you there.