The Client Challenge
A large, urban East Coast academic medical center (AMC) was incurring significant costs due to inefficient technology and a decentralized billing structure that spanned more than 20 specialties, as well as 4 outsourced vendors. It elected to implement Epic as its enterprise electronic health record (EHR) and saw this as an opportunity to not only improve technology but also an opportunity to evaluate and enhance its operational structure.
IMPLEMENTING AN ENTERPRISE EHR PROVED TO BE A CATALYST FOR OPTIMIZING THE FOLLOWING:
- Staffing model and organization structure
- Metric & productivity management
- Vendor alignment and management
- Technology enablement
Navigating to Next: The Solution
While Epic provided immediate benefits through its Enterprise platform, numerous operational changes were required to enhance its operating model. With a goal of eventually reducing costs and enabling efficiencies through Epic, the AMC partnered with Chartis to conduct a comprehensive staffing assessment and cost-to-collect analysis to identify areas of opportunity. Several insights immediately emerged: (1) the organization’s decentralized staff led to inefficiencies within the billing space; (2) the existing organization structure resulted in inconsistent processes and a lack of accountability over charging and accounts receivable (AR) metrics; and (3) the utilization of outsourced vendors led to increased costs.
Following the initial assessment, Chartis partnered with the health system to design and develop an optimized organizational structure with clear roles and responsibilities, targeted key performance indicators (KPIs), and governance processes for each area of the revenue cycle. Utilizing this framework, the organization was able to identify and integrate leading-practice Epic workflows to improve revenue cycle metrics and reduce costs.
