State of Claims 2024: Insights from survey findings

“Reducing denials upfront would improve our revenue, which could be channeled into current and future investments that support our mission.” —Joshua Gayman, Revenue Cycle Manager at UT Medical Center Challenge The University of Tennessee Medical Center (UT Medical Center) is a leading 710-bed acute care hospital with a rich history of exceptional patient care and award-winning services. During the pandemic, the hospital faced revenue losses of around $45 million that put serious strain on its capacity to invest in bigger and better facilities. UT Medical Center needed to find a strategy to recover some of this revenue by reducing claim denials at the point of patient registration. UT Medical Center relied on eligibility checks that often missed errors in patient registration, resulting in increased claims denials, costly reworks, and wasted staff time. The hospital urgently needed a solution to help staff identify and resolve potential patient registration errors in real time to prevent denials before they occur. Finding a more efficient way to capture accurate patient and benefits data would be essential. Proactively preventing claim denials would provide the hospital with a much-needed boost in cash collections and free up staff to focus on patient care. Solution To address its claims denials challenge, UT Medical Center partnered with Experian Health and implemented Registration QA, a solution designed to find and fix registration errors upfront. Now, when patients first arrive, front-end staff enter their data to verify insurance. If Registration QA finds an error, it alerts staff in real-time so they can resolve it within 72 hours. Alongside more than 400 alert rules curated by Experian Health, UT Medical Center also built custom alerts based on the organization's specific requirements, using demographics and benefits data. The tool easily integrates with existing workflows, and its configurable dashboard gives UT Medical Center Management detailed insights into department performance and allows staff to track trends and identify areas for improvement. This proactive approach to correcting errors significantly reduces the risk of downstream denials and helps patient registration staff take proper corrective actions for their errors without management intervention. More accurate patient registration is also better for patients, as fewer errors make for a smoother intake experience. Outcome UT Medical Center successfully optimized patient registration by using Registration QA to identify registration errors before and at the point of service, reducing denials and boosting revenue. In the 12 months after implementing Registration QA, UT Medical Center saw the following results: Now that registration errors can be identified before and at the point of service, UT Medical Center has seen initial denials drop from an average of $5 million per month in 2022 to just $1.7 million in 2023, representing a 66% decrease in average monthly initial denials value. Cash write-offs also decreased, dropping 57% from an average of $1 million to just over $400K, helping the organization keep bad debt low. Gayman notes that UT Medical Center's partnership with Experian Health was central to its success. Experian Health shared the organization's vision and provided weekly support to help realize it. They developed a customized curriculum to make sure staff were confident using Registration QA and offered insights into what was happening more widely in the industry, so UT Medical Center's team could benchmark their performance against similar organizations. Thanks to these savings, the hospital can increase its capacity to invest in new projects and deliver operational excellence, while improving patient satisfaction. Find out more about how Registration QA helps healthcare organizations minimize denials and increase cash flow through accurate patient registration. Learn more Contact us

“You know when the Patient Access Curator went live because you can see it in our stock price. It helped us drive a $100 million bottom-line improvement within two quarters.” —Ken Kubisty, Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Exact Sciences Challenge Exact Sciences is a prominent cancer diagnostics laboratory with an annual net revenue of around $2.6 billion, that's best known for its flagship cancer screening test, Cologuard. After a period of rapid growth demand for its test, Exact Sciences faced the difficult task of collecting accurate patient data and verifying insurance eligibility at scale. Anticipating a 25% growth in annual testing volumes, Ken Kubisty, Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Exact Sciences, says the organization “needed an automated, real-time solution" to capture accurate data from the start. The company had four specific objectives: Improve the accuracy of patient insurance data to reduce errors and denials. Streamline processes to handle rising testing volumes without increasing headcount. Reduce claim denials to bring in more revenue (especially those related to eligibility and timely filing). Ensure accurate identity verification in lab settings, where patient, physician and lab data aren't unified within a single data management system. Watch the webinar: Hear our pre-recorded session from our annual Experian Health High-Performance Summit 2024 (HPS), featuring Exact Sciences and Trinity Health, as they reveal how Patient Access Curator helped their organizations automate eligibility, reduce denials, and more, all with a single click. Solution In need of a single solution to solve multiple challenges, Exact Sciences turned to Experian Health's Patient Access Curator. This new product provided the team with a way to run inquiries for eligibility, Medicare beneficiary identifiers, coordination of benefits, insurance discovery and demographic data with a single click. Instead of juggling multiple products and vendors, registrars would be able to capture and verify patient data in a single transaction. Through automation and machine learning, Patient Access Curator could deliver results in less than 30 seconds and help submit clean claims the first time – reducing the risk of denials even as volumes increased. Experian Health's implementation experts configured the tool to Exact Sciences' needs, integrating over 4,000 payer plans nationwide and customizing parameters for real-time eligibility checks and data validation. Experian Health also delivered staff training to support the transition to the new system. Watch the video: See how Experian Health's Patient Access Curator streamlines patient access and billing, addressing claim denials, data quality and real-time corrections to boost your business's bottom line. Outcome Thanks to Patient Access Curator, Exact Sciences achieved the following results: 15% increase in revenue per test due to accurate eligibility and fewer denials 4x business volume without increasing headcount 50% reduction in denials and major improvement in timely filings $100 million added to the bottom line in 6 months Ken Kubisty, VP of Revenue Cycle at Exact Sciences, shares how Patient Access Curator improved eligibility processes, reduced errors and more. Overall, Kubisty credits Experian Health's Patient Access Curator for helping Exact Sciences overcome critical pain points resulting from data errors and eligibility issues. Solving for bad data quality with real-time data correction freed staff from tedious manual work, ensuring faster, more accurate claims processing – all without growing headcount. After implementing Patient Access Curator, the company is ready to scale and handle growing volumes efficiently, say goodbye to late filing denials and scale smarter. For Kubisty, this highlights how technology drives efficiency and sustainable growth. Learn more about how Patient Access Curator helps patient access teams prevent claim denials by solving for bad data quality with real-time data correction. Learn more Contact us

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