The Challenge
Barnes Jewish Health System consists of 9 community hospitals, 3 academic medical centers and multiple community health locations. The system had come together for competitive market reasons, leaving many disparate revenue cycle processes in place. As part of its revenue cycle transformation, management wanted to implement a standardized financial clearance process for outpatient services that would improve the patient experience as well as produce improved financial results.
The Story
Each of the community hospitals had a partial financial clearance in place. None, however, had a complete process. Barnes Jewish leadership recognized that standardizing processes in a centralized financial clearance unit would achieve the greatest improvement at the least cost. Given the complexity of the implementation, Barnes Jewish engaged Salvum Consulting and its subcontractor, Goldman Health Strategies LLC (GHS) to assist with the implementation.
The Results
Within a year of implementing a standard pre-service financial clearance process for the four pilot community hospitals, the unit has expanded to include all hospitals in the system, improving the patient experience at the same time that patient collections have increased.
The Solution
Partnership
The consulting project team partnered with Barnes Jewish patient access leadership to successfully implement a centralized financial clearance unit.
Project Management
The consulting team fleshed out and monitored the detailed project plan including key dependencies for information technology changes and physical space readiness.
Business Model, Workflows and Staffing
As part of the implementation, the team developed detailed workflows, operating processes and policies and procedures, and determined performance metrics and monitoring tools. We developed a staffing model tool and clinical service authorization database that was transitioned to patient access management.
Change Management
To manage a change of this magnitude, Barnes Jewish Patient Access leadership and GHS met with community hospital leadership to obtain their buy-in, identify staff to transition to the new unit and communicate the changes to the medical staffs.
Training and Go-Live Support
Finally, the team provided on site support and served as interim management during the first month of implementation. This day to day support allowed us to quickly identify and resolve issues, from IT requirements through fine tuning of workflows.