When you're running a 1,171 bed hospital, there's always some way to find wasted spending in the large budget you have in place. At Mount Sinai Hospital, it came from taking a closer look at how billing functions were working, using an existing piece of software which allowed it to dig in deeper to its revenue cycle problems.
Right now, the hospital's primary business intelligence application, WebFOCUS, is used by about 1,000 outpatient physicians known as Faculty Practice Associates. The group uses a WebFOCUS dashboard to keep track of growth, productivity and revenue cycle metrics. It has also been using this tool to analyze business operations, including specific details on how cost centers were performing.
Recently, however, Mount Sinai was able to raise the ante without spending anything more on IT. Using WebFOCUS, controllers at the facility were able to find more than $5 million in missed charges. When the charges were rebilled, the hospital collected almost $3 million in one year.
In the future, Mount Sinai hopes to add Information Builders' Integrated Health Information application suite and performance management framework for healthcare, which should make it easier to track metrics and create scorecards, dashboards and roles. In the meantime, $3 million in new collections is nothing to sneeze at!
To learn more about this case:
- read this Healthcare Finance News piece
Related Articles:
Survey: Revenue cycle execs focused on patient collections
HFMA ANI 2009: Revenue cycle management rules the day
Hospital, doctors' office kiosks increasingly used for collections