Connecting RCM Technology Adoption to Financial Performance

Introduction to RCM Technology Adoption

Welcome to today's webinar, connecting RCM technology adoption to financial performance.

This is Ashley Becker, HFMA's Manager of Client Services, and I will be moderating today's session.

Now it is my pleasure to welcome today's speakers.

Nicole Clawson is the vice president of revenue cycle at Pennsylvania Mountains Health Care Alliance. Nicole is responsible for the revenue cycle division as well as finance within PMHA, which consists consists of twelve member hospitals.

Nicole has grown the divisions to include overall revenue cycles, shared service management, chargemaster, revenue integrity, contract management, and revenue cycle system management and optimization.

She focuses on creating efficiencies in revenue cycle with technology, standardization, and process improvement.

Jeff Becker is vice president of portfolio marketing at FinThrive.

Jeff's digital health background spans sales, marketing, product development management consulting, and industry analyst research.

Jeff has advised many of the largest technology firms in the world on their health care vertical growth strategy and has guided some of the largest payer and provider organizations on adoption of emerging technologies.

And with that, Jeff, I'll turn the presentation over to you.

Great. Thank you, Ashley.

And thank you everybody for joining us today to learn a little bit more about the RCM technology adoption model.

As you'll learn in the subsequent, presentation, we have developed this model in collaboration with HFMA.

We launched this about a year ago, and so we're excited to walk through both the underlying premise for why we embarked on this research together as well as some of the first year in review outcomes that organizations that have participated in the RCM technology adoption model have realized.

And so without further ado, it, gives me great pleasure to introduce us all to Nicole Clawson.

Overview of Pennsylvania Mountains Healthcare Alliance

Just a quick overview of our agenda. Nicole's gonna take us through the background of Pennsylvania Mountain Healthcare Alliance, why they saw a fit for bringing a framework like, RCMTAM to Pennsylvania Mountain Healthcare Alliance.

And then I'll walk us through the actual construction of the RCMTAM, how we approach the research, how we iterated on it together with our beta customers and HFMA, and what that final, adoption model looks like today. We'll walk you through what an intake experience looks like and what a readout experience looks like, and then we'll walk through actual outcomes from customers that have participated in, our RCMTAM. We'll close with questions. And as Ashley had mentioned, we'll close with some, some polling surveys, and then we'll wrap up.

So to begin, we'll move over to Nicole.

Good after good afternoon, everyone, and thanks, Jeff. I just wanna give everyone a little overview of of PMHA, Pennsylvania Mountains Healthcare Alliance, and who we are, as we get started.

So just to give you a little overview, we are primarily based in Western Pennsylvania. We do have some western New York members as well as on the East Coast of Pennsylvania, but we are a collaborative network of independent or as we call it independent minded because we have some affiliations in the group together, but community hospitals, generally rural.

Our mission is to enhance the ability of its member hospitals to provide patient centered community based care and to maintain that independent status as a community hospital serving the population within those townships.

PMHA hospitals have maximized revenue, minimized cost, and really became more efficient operating providers and contributors to their respectable, communities. And a lot of that has to do with the technology we use in coordination with our management.

Just a a little snapshot of where we are, as far as proximity to each other, our hospitals are really spread out.

And we have twelve member hospitals within the PMHA network and fourteen that use our technology to support the patient revenue of one point one billion with, about a thousand and five staffed beds throughout, our organization.

Challenges in Revenue Cycle Management

Some of our challenges. So, when we look back, it started in twenty twenty one where we started a task force, and we really had some technological challenges, when I started to look five to ten years out, were the companies that we were using, there were multiples.

Were they investing in technology? Were they were they looking at best practice or or where we needed to be five years out?

We had, like I said, multiple vendors, different platforms within the pockets of rev cycle. So, you know, we did have a charge master system. We had an eligibility system, but they didn't tie together and they were different vendors, which then created separate databases. So we couldn't connect the dots between our different, revenue cycle, departments.

We really found that we had lack of analytics.

We couldn't report the way we wanted to. There was a lot of manual manipulation when we did our monthly reporting. It still wasn't optimal, and we really had to piece together the reports that we wanted to get.

Workforce.

A third and, probably one of our biggest challenges at one point or another was finding the talent. So we are in rural Pennsylvania. I think, I've worked in urban settings as well. Same problems. Right? We have issues finding that expert talent, clinical or nonclinical, in this case, within revenue cycle.

And then we need to utilize the people in the most optimal way. I don't necessarily wanna cut any of our staff. I just want them to work more efficiently, and sometimes that might include automation, as what we were looking to accomplish.

RCM vendor performance. So it's difficult to measure. You all can probably agree on that. Expensive to maintain, and it duplicates, in offerings. It might overlap in different, vendors, but it was very hard for us to find one vendor that did it all or that could accomplish everything that we would consider to be end to end.

Every hospital that I know of is closely evaluating all relationships. Those third party vendors, wanna know, can we eliminate them? Can we consolidate them?

My option was to put a strategy together to consolidate them, consolidate them to get everything that I I just talked about.

So when we look at common concerns, from revenue cycle leadership, it was what's inside and what's outside of my core EHR. What can be done inside? You know, we looked at that. We looked at what could we use that's already in our different EHR systems. In in my case, we have multiple EHRs, so we don't have a consistent EHR amongst the membership.

So that was the first challenge. And then the second challenge was, could it do everything we needed? And the answer in any of our EHR systems was no.

What RCM technology is in place today? So what did we currently have and what did we need and where our gaps were? That was another thing we we looked at.

What's the total cost of ownership?

When we look at moving towards one vendor, does that mean that we can get some premier, pricing? Does that mean that, we can work together and have a partner? That's what that's what we were looking for at PMHA was I don't want a vendor. I want a partner that can that we can grow along alongside with.

And has the yield from those solutions improved? So we have to get value, and we we wanna make for sure that when we implement these solutions, we're improving what we currently had.

IT and data connections. I will say in our whole year long system strategy, we focused on IT, and that's one thing I should have focused on more. Just making sure that in my case, we have various different IT departments. So making sure that, every IT department, whether they're consolidated or separate, is all on board when you're moving towards, and going through your RCMTAM model.

Strategic path.

What is my strategic path? Our path was, you know, we went a year to find the right vendor, and that that ended up to be one that could perform, the end to end, which we found in FinThrive.

Where we can automate or leverage predictive analytics.

We're still not completely automated because we're still implementing systems, but that is, you know, top of my list is where we can automate. I mentioned finding the talent and keeping them, doing what they do best, but then automating the rest. What is something easy that we can use bots or automation for?

And then how many vendors do I need? I wanted to limit that to, minimal.

I wanted the least amount of vendors, someone that I could actually work with and, like I said, alongside with.

That's what we came up with.

So approaches to, enhancing revenue management.

So based on a survey of CFOs and vice presidents, the strategic focus, three out of four, always came back to technology.

And really, that's what we focus on at PMHA. Technology is the core of our revenue cycle management.

Anybody can have a system, but it's how you use it and, how you have it set up so it can be effective. And, really, seventy nine percent of the survey was finding that partner in in technology and, of course, the the the talent that goes with that.

Great. Thanks, Nicole. So this brings us to our first survey question.

And what we're interested in understanding is how is your organization currently approaching RCM modernization planning?

So we'll give you a minute to look over those responses and, select all that apply for you.

Nicole, how before your organization pursued your RCMTAM, analysis, how were you all pursuing modernization planning?

Well, I I think when we went through our our current back then in in twenty twenty one, I pulled in, various different leaders from all the hospitals to be on our committee. I think they all had to have buy in and be involved.

That included CFOs.

That included, you know, directors, managers, and even some of the some of the frontline staff. I think that was very important, in our approach because of the buy in. And the RCMTM really helped us look at our gaps as well as that came out towards the end of everything.

Very good.

Let's see what the, general market thinks. So the top response here is that organizations assign internal staff to monitor RCM technology landscape and own modernization planning, followed by third party consulting firms coming in and assessing and providing recommendations for RCM maturity.

About twenty percent of the market reports that they don't have a formal process for RCM modernization planning, which I think is interesting. And, a trailing twelve percent will use third party analyst firms like Class Research or Gartner to advise on RCM technology modernization efforts.

So interesting results.

So Oh, sorry, Jeff. I was just gonna add as we as we look at those polling answers, I would say when we were going through it, while we did have a formal process, I incorporated in that, the class research and those various different organizations to help select our top, say, top five, vendors that we were gonna look at.

Very good. And I think that's a common approach. We see that as well. A combination of internal resources trying to maintain, a sense of what's happening in the revenue cycle market as well as some engagement with class research or other third party organizations to sort of round out that research.

Introduction to the RCM Technology Adoption Model

So the next section that we'll bring you through is really the introduction of the RCM technology adoption model or as we call it, RCMTAM.

When we initiated this research, what, as a as a vendor organization, what FinThrive was really looking for, was an existing modernization framework that we could align ourselves to. And so we we went to a number of different organizations, HFA, Class Research, Kaufman Hall, and others, and just looking for existing, technology frameworks that were designed to support revenue cycle organizations, revenue cycle leaders so that we could align our own, portfolio of offerings against that modernization framework and start having a more consultative conversation with our clients and our prospects on how we would, propose staging adoption of various technologies and understanding, where their white space was and what what they were currently happy and satisfied with and where there was opportunities for us to work together. When we did that initial research, we didn't find that there was an existing, technology adoption model, that was architected for revenue cycle leaders.

We know just from working in this industry for, as long as we've been here that, technology, optimization models have had a significant during meaningful use, HIMSS launched the EMR adoption model, which was a step seven stage model.

And that drove a significant amount of technology adoption on the clinical side of our organizations. That model is really what drove, the ordering of medications electronically, barcode scanning at the bedside for medication administration, and a lot of important patient safety and clinical focused, technologies were deployed as a part of the HIMSS EHR adoption model. And so we wanted that model was largely silent for revenue cycle, and we wanted to to address that gap in the marketplace and ensure that, as an increased amount of both investment and focus shifts to optimizing revenue cycle, that there was a consensus based framework that the industry could leverage to guide, planning and, strategy discussions.

So to start this, we surveyed a hundred unique organizations, all revenue cycle leaders from director to VP to CFO and CRO, spanning all major, inpatient EHR vendors.

And what we wanted to understand was really two things. One was, what does your organization's revenue cycle tech stack look like today, and what do your financial outcomes look like today? And with that information, we felt like we could correlate technology utilization with financial performance and starts to put out some compelling consensus based research on a, a modernization path that is proven and and based on inputs from the market.

So with the hundred unique unique organizations we surveyed, we exited that survey with twenty eight thousand, unique data points from revenue cycle leaders about the technologies that they're using and about the financial outcomes that they were realizing.

So the first thing that we did with that, survey was we surveyed on a hundred and twenty different, technology capabilities that span, everything from patient access to revenue integrity, to back office, through analytics, and through automation. And, if, just to put a point on it, we we really wanted to separate the signal from the noise in the revenue cycle market. Every year, Becker's publishes a top revenue cycle leaders to know report, and this year has had three hundred and fifty eight revenue cycle vendors on it. So it just gives you a sense of how, oversaturated the revenue cycle market is and how many different opportunities there are to spend precious, revenue cycle technology dollars on on vendors and on capabilities that may not yield meaningful outcomes.

And so when we fielded the survey, we asked all of the participating respondents to identify what technologies they had in place today and then indicate to us whether they saw those technologies as mission critical, high value, moderate value, minimal value, or no value, or even not RCM. We also wanted to really understand where people saw the periphery of RCM versus population health or supply chain or staffing and scheduling. And so, we fielded that survey.

And then when we went about starting the process of building out the adoption model, we only moved the technologies forward where the consensus in the market was that this was mission critical or high value. So everything else was left outside of the model, and we'll continue to monitor those areas to see if that changes over time. But today in time, the RCMTAM is only built on mission critical and high value technologies. And we did that because we want this model to be based on technologies. And we did that because we want this model to be based on the learnings of revenue cycle leaders like yourselves and where you're seeing the most impact for your technology investment.

Understanding Technology Adoption and Financial Performance

Now the next thing that we wanted to understand is of those just those mission critical and high value technologies, how well adopted are these? Is there white space broadly in the market to drive adoption of high value technologies that are being underutilized. So we captured that information. What's in place today? What's on your short term implementation radar?

And we segmented the market from the standpoint of perception of value and then overall adoption.

So when we took our first pass at, segmenting these technologies, this is the this is the first approach that we took. And what we see here is on the left hand side, you have technologies that currently have broad industry adoption.

Dark green technologies are those that, were seen as mission critical, and light green were those that were seen as high value. And you'll see things here like eligibility checking and ChargeMaster and claims clearing house and so on and so forth. And then on the right hand side, you'll see the emerging technologies, areas where organizations that are using these technologies do see them as mission critical to their organization, but there's relatively low adoption within the market, like running your insurance discover in the previsit space, bringing automation through your prior authorization process from determination to form submission to status monitoring, bringing automation into your appeals workflows, and then as, Nicole was talking about building out a true end to end analytics program.

So we were excited. When we saw the first cut of the raw data, you know, we all had our hypothesis about what this might look like and what technologies really were moving the needle for organizations, but we were excited to see this layout in a way that, sort of passed that initial sanity test on what where we thought these, pieces would turn up.

So the next thing that we wanted to do was expose this database to the broader market so that any organization could come to this research and benchmark their technology stack against, where the market sits. And so to do that, we needed to segment each organization into a stage. So we created a five stage model, and we worked with ten beta organizations spanning Epic Cerner and Epic Oracle Health and Meditech organizations.

And we worked with them on the intake process, the readout process, and the underlying scoring model that we're gonna use to segment these. What we really wanted was two things.

We wanted a scoring model that left our top stage as a an aspirational stage, something that was going to be seen as something for us all to strive for. And we wanted our first stage really to be seen as, the industry's starting point. This is where the majority of respondents that come through the adoption model start. So in contrast to the HIMSS, MRAM, which had seven stages, stage one and stage two were relatively rare stages to end up in and could sometimes be perceived as a having a negative connotation, and we didn't want that.

So we rolled all of those early stages up to a stage one that really represents our industry starting point. And then from there, you can see how the various stages segment out. The underlying scoring model that we used to get here is that if your organization is leveraging ninety percent of the mission critical technologies and given stage, that's the stage that we assign you to, so long as you meet that criteria in all proceeding stages. So when we look at that in aggregate, what we'll see is the final published version of the RCMTAM.

Stage one simply means that you have not adopted all of the mission ninety percent of the mission critical and fifty percent of the high value technologies in stage two, and then so on and so forth as we make our way through the adoption model.

Linking Technology Adoption to Financial Performance

The last and probably most important thing that we wanted to, dig into was the correlation between, leveraging mission critical and high value technologies and financial performance improvement.

So when we came into this research, our hypothesis was that, if we created an adoption model that really is just focused on technologies that organizations are telling us are having a high impact, and we're serving financial leaders. These are financial buyers. They're, savvy when it comes to selecting vendors and including ROI in their decision making process that if we studied that ROI in aggregate, we would find large, opportunities when we focused just on those organizations that were disproportionately in the stage four, stage five category where they were using these technologies that were deemed high value and mission critical.

And so we ran the analysis. And for this, we used HFMA's map keys as an underlying definition for each of the, financial key performance indicators. And what we found was, about a thirty percent improvement in point of service collections from stage one to stage four or five organizations, a double digit improvement in AR days, particularly over ninety. Denials rates dropped significantly.

Cost to collect comes down. Bad debt comes down. So we were this was really where, the proof was in the pudding. This was all just analysis at this point.

We've now had a year of review, so we're starting to look at actual financial outcomes from organizations that have gone through this process. But we were encouraged to to see that, the adoption model does yield, financial performance improvement for organizations that adhere to it. And so we were excited to see that as well.

Overview of the RCMTAM Methodology

So that's the overall, RCMTAM methodology.

The approach that we took as we were working our way through the design of the survey and the analysis, the beta customers that worked through the intake process with us and the readout experience and the scoring model.

So the next thing that we'll do is we'll look at the results from that work. We'll look at the the the readout experience that organizations go through. From an intake standpoint, TAM from HFMA. They can access our RCMTAM directly from FinThrive.

There's a intake assessment you can access digitally. You can access that on a a PDF or a Word document so that you can share that internally. So a lot of effort has gone into taking down the barriers to just accessing this. And the other important thing to talk about when it comes to the intake, and the overall experience is that, well, for one, it's completely free and always will be free.

This is an open source resource that we've introduced to the market just simply to help organizations assess their current state and and, strategically plan for, what their next few years are gonna look like from a technology procurement standpoint.

And the other thing that I think is important to to speak to is that it's vendor agnostic. So, we we had a a heavy hand in its architecture at FinThrive, but there are technologies on the adoption model that FinThrive doesn't sell or support, and there are technologies that we do sell that are not on the adoption model. So, just important to to make note that this is a a fully independent vendor agnostic model that is just open for general use.

So with that and a little bit of understanding on the intake, we'll go into the readout experience.

Understanding the Readout Experience

So the readouts for RCMTAM are, fairly succinct. They're designed to be executive friendly decks that you can take, presents to your teams and your leadership, and, articulate your current state and future state plan for your revenue cycle function.

So the first thing that you get when you participate in the RCMTAM program is your technology, benchmarking assessment. And so this is, your organization's current stage. So we will present all of the technologies in each stage.

And then l will indicate that you've reported that you're using this, but it's just in a limited capacity. So we have the ability to pick up on areas where maybe you're piloting this in certain service areas, places of service or service lines, or maybe you're just in the process of implementing.

A check market just indicates that you're fully deployed with this capability.

These light orange indicators are just telling you that this is your white space for, for revenue cycle. And then any of the gray areas are indicating that this is already on your road map. You've already allocated, budget or you you have a planned investment in bringing these capabilities to your organization within the next twelve months. From here, we're also starting to capture areas of high dissatisfaction so that we can highlight that for you on these readouts as well. So we want you to know and be able to articulate back to your organization areas where you might have fully deployed a technology, but it's not meeting your organization's needs. And so, we've also started incorporating areas of high dissatisfaction into your technology footprints.

From here, the next piece of your assessment that you'll receive is your financial bench marking. So earlier, we looked at what does the stage one organization look like as compared to a stage four and five organization. But with the RCMTAM, we'll actually drill down into looking at what is your organization's financial performance against those HFMA map keys as compared to a stage four or stage five organization. And this really gives you, almost that, treasure map to where where the value is for your organization.

So you'll see your reported financial performance compared to stage four or five average, and your differential. So you'll be able to see for my organization or for this organization, the opportunity really lives in point of service collection and denials. That's disproportionately where the opportunity for improvement lives with some lesser improvement available in AR days reduction and cost to collect. Areas where you see a check mark means that you're already performing at that stage four five average.

And we'll see this with some stage three and two and even sometimes stage one organizations. So what we'll find is that, they are, they are overcoming technology barriers with people or really clean process, and and that's a, those are always interesting conversations to have and dig into how they're achieving those results without those technologies in place because we know that we do have all of those levers.

Mapping Technology to Core Processes

As a piece of feedback from our, ten initial beta organizations, one of the things that routinely came up was they said, look, it's all well and good to give us a, you know, a technology, benchmarking assessment, but we think in terms of people process and technology. So what would be more valuable for us is if you took those technologies and mapped them back to the core processes that they support within our revenue cycle.

So we we worked with them to do that and mapped out everything from patient acquisition to scheduling, through coding and claims editing, final bill, cash posting.

Where you already have technology in place. So all of these dark green, areas or technologies that your organization has already implemented, and then highlight the areas for opportunity. The dark orange, these are mission critical technologies that support this process that you don't have in place that your organization because we know we can't solve everything overnight, and we need to tackle modernization in segments that process, you can consider as a part of that, rearchitecture and that retraining of your end users and your introduction of new technologies, all of the potential areas where you could have an outsized impact for those end users, and for that function area.

And so we take this as an opportunity to, refine the conversation or focus the conversation on just where are those high impact areas within your organization. And this is different every time that we do, on our RCMTAM assessment for health system. They'll have different areas of opportunity, where there really is an outsized impact to have a meaningful, to to meaningfully transform a function area and and have an impact on those financial performance metrics.

So for this organization, you can see that it is scheduling, preregistration, charge capture, and then all of your back office from, final bill to appeals, to cash posting.

Modernization Framework for Revenue Cycle

The last element of the RCMTAM is a modernization framework, and this is a roll forward of everything that you've identified that is on your twelve month implementation road map as well as the pieces that the RCMTAM critical process audit has uncovered as high potential technologies for you to consider as you're moving through those modernization, programs yourselves.

So when we when we do these, modernization, these overall RCM technology adoption model, assessments, we'll work with the organization. We'll work with the organizations on the intake assessment, and then we'll even work with the organizations on, some of the subjective interpretation of the critical process audit, identifying the right core areas, identifying the right modernization framework that feels, aligned with the the overall direction the organization is going.

And it tends to then result in, a deck that and a report that these organizations can bring back to their executive team. We have customers that have used this to directly to present to their boards to secure, increase technology investment funding, and then to hold themselves accountable to the financial performance improvement that they had forecasted. So, we we love the the overall layout and the content that's been put into this readout really was designed by revenue cycle leaders for revenue cycle leaders. And I think that that's why it has had such a positive impact on organizations, as they turn around and use these resources internally.

So that's the RCMTAM from a, hypothesis and execution of the research that we did all all the way through the actual readout experience. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that HFMA also played, an important part of, auditing, designing, collaborating on what questions we would ask in the intake assessment, what quest how we would present that information back to organizations to make sure that these reports resonate at the executive level. So, they were great partners with us throughout the entire design process for that.

Discussing Outcomes and Market Impact

So now the really the most exciting part, I think, of our session today is we get to talk about outcomes. We get to talk about how our RCMTAM is landing within the market and how it's driving, innovation and modernization forward in revenue cycle.

And to get us started, we will hand it back to Nicole so she can speak to her experience at PMHA.

Alright. So this is the fun part for sure.

We are I'll talk about the year end review, but we're still in implementation. And and that's mainly because of the just the sheer volume of the hospitals that we're implementing at once.

We have four officially that that kicked off in implementation all at the same time with all of the products.

And then at least two to three more snuck in. And so we're we're we're really trying to juggle it. Everybody's really excited.

And I'll just back up a minute to say, you know, while we didn't have the modernization roadmap initially when we first started, it was very exciting to see, once it became available, through FinThrive that we were on the right track. And those that we deemed end to end were were part of our our road map track. And, as we continue on, I can't wait to see all the financial performance.

So I'll just go back a little bit. We had charge capture, through FinThrive, and we had the claims management. So it was adding the rest of of the service as we chose one vendor, and really kicked it off with front end, middle, back, and, contract management. So contract management was our first one, that went live. We we went live between the hospitals. I'd say it was a four month span.

Whoever got their, criteria met first, we didn't wait for the other, hospital. And we immediately found one payer that we could recoup a hundred and fifty thousand dollars off the bat. And, while I can't give the group total financial performance, that was that was quick money. I mean and that was quick cash that we wouldn't have found if it wasn't for doing our, variance work within just one of the multiple products in our end to end.

And just to speak a little bit about the adoption model and the RCMTAM, we've used that in a couple different, areas, and that would be to show value for maybe those that weren't in the committee or the strategic plan, planning sessions, but also in our new members. So we have used it and gone out, and they have surveyed, and we could come back still being agnostic because I don't you know, if they don't choose us to manage their rev cycle, I wanna make for sure that they're still successful. And it it really was eye opening. I think so for anybody, like Jeff said, as a free tool to assess your own organization, I think everyone everyone will find it, very beneficial.

And then as we move on, you know, we'll we'll continue to update how we're doing. Again, this is essentially fourteen hospitals that that we're working to roll out, with a goal of within the next year. So we we look forward to more, KPI enhancements and being able to wrap all that data together.

Thanks, Nicole.

So as Nicole tackles a rollout across fourteen hospitals, we do have outcomes from organizations that, are rolling technology out across, a smaller overall footprint. And so we are starting to see with this one year in review, we're starting to see some of that financial outcome improvement. One of those that we've just wrapped up our one year in review analysis with was University of California San Diego. UCSC is about a thousand hospital epic shop. They use epic where they can. They supplement with third party where they need to.

Case Study: UC San Diego's Financial Improvements

And their underlying objective was really to come in with a third party framework to assess where they work from front, middle, and back, as well as analytics and automation use cases, and understand where their opportunities for financial improvement were. And so for, UCSD, they set an implementation timeline as well as an analytics timeline on improving core processes.

And over this first twelve months, they've netted, a two million dollar, improvement in point of service collections, and they've improved their clean claims rate by about four percent from a ninety three to a ninety seven. And, Mike Vigo, the chief revenue officer at UCSD, has been a big advocate for the impact that RCM Tim has had, not just on his, out the financial performance and his ability to, present a strategic vision to his board, but also just in the, impact that it's had on his team in bringing front and back offices together and creating alignment across these organizations and collaboration across something that felt like a a true, technology modernization program for his team. And so there's been a lot of positive sentiment developed within that organization's RCM, leadership structure as a result of coming together and going through this process together.

Another one that, I think is interesting and speaks directly to some of the learnings from the survey that we did, today together was the, really the the number two, strategy in in place by organizations on this call is to bring in third party consulting firms to do RCM audits. And, that was the story with Banner Health as well. Banner was bringing in expensive third party consultants to run technology audits modernization.

Value of RCMTAM in Consulting Practices

And when when we worked with, Banner, they one of the primary values they said was, we hire these big consulting firms and, they produce a an analysis that's very similar to what we've gone through with our RCMTAM. And so we see immense value really in just the experience of, adopting the RCMTAM. It's consensus based. It's not someone's secret sauce. It's open source. It is, bias for us. And so, they saw a lot of value in just the fact that this was a, a free resource for revenue cycle leaders to evaluate their tech stock and then reallocate that con those consulting dollars to, more tangent, outcomes driven strategies and initiatives.

So I was excited to see that as well.

And then the last piece that I'll touch on on year end review is partnership success. So we've really been focused and working directly with HFMA on bringing our CMTM out to provider organizations directly.

But as that activity has increased, there have been the very same consulting firms that we, were speaking about on the last slide that have actually started coming to us and asking if they could adopt, RCMTAM as a part of their own, practices. And we we allow for that, but we told them that it was always going to be under the condition that they facilitate those readouts for free for the health systems. So these organizations are now bringing our RCMTAM out to the market, adopting the model as part of their consulting practices, and those services are being delivered for free. So we're really excited about the scale that we're gonna be able to reach as more consulting firms come online to start bringing this out to the health systems, and keeping that free for organizations.

Advocacy and Industry Recognition

And the the last piece that I'll speak about is really just, evangelism is you you can tell if something is starting to gain traction if the advocacy organizations are picking up on it too. And so RCMTAM was, was accepted as a, speaking opportunity for Naham.

HIMSS, we were, accepted for, a speaker slot, which if, for anybody that's ever worked on the vendor side, you know that HIMSS is can be a very challenging, conference for vendors to secure speaker slots for. So we were really excited to be able to bring this forward, and introduce this to the, to the CIO community and the IT sides of our businesses and help them start thinking about how to effectively partner with CFOs and revenue cycle leaders on modernization. It was a really collaborative and productive conversation.

And then, of course, HFMA rev cycle conference and HFMA annual. So we've had a a really positive, at, out showing from from the, advocacy organizations.

So that brings us to the end of our prepared material. We have a few different, very quick, survey questions that we'll work you through so you can, we can get more insight from you all, and so you can get your CME credits. So make sure to get these in, and then we will cut right over to q and a time and and answer any questions. So the first question is just on the value that you see in technology adoption, models or technology maturity frameworks, focused specifically to our segment of revenue cycle.

We'll leave that open for a minute.

Nicole, any feedback from the folks that you've brought this out to within your, new member community, on how that has landed for them?

Well, I think, Schock was probably the first, to see where their white space and their gaps were, because I think they thought they had more than they actually did. And and these were, you know, a CEO, a CFO, operation. So it was a a various group, and and I I really think that was it it was shocking to them to see their their white space.

Very good.

And it looks like there's pretty broad consensus within this group that this is highly valuable or at least somewhat valuable with no respondents indicating that it wouldn't be valuable at all and just three percent of the market seeing this as minimally valuable. And so I we appreciate that. We're glad that this is out in the market. We want consensus driven research for you all so that you have the tools that you need, and you don't need to pay consultants. And you have various channels that you can navigate to get access to, the kinds of perspectives that, your peers are reporting. And this this underlying data model will only continue to get larger and more representative and will continue publishing out, findings from this.

Awareness of RCMTAM Framework

So let's go on, to our next question, which is simply about awareness. So the RCMTAM has been in market for a year now. And so we're interested in understanding, firm believer that word-of-mouth is the is the most important, measure, of awareness and just just, interested in your overall level of awareness on the RCMTAM framework prior to today's webinar.

This will help us understand how where we need to focus to continue to promote and profile this.

And I think we should be close to wrapping up on this one.

So interestingly, not not terribly surprising, but only about twenty percent of the market was already aware of RCMTAM prior to today's call. So I'm glad that the hundred and three respondents that weren't aware before today now are aware. You should go and look into this.

But we'll continue to drive awareness and and drive up your various channels that you can access this research through. We have consulting, and we have HFA, and we have ourselves, and we'll continue to do our best to expand the the access points for you all.

And our last question is really focused on, helping us do just that. So from your own points of view, how can HFMA and FinThrive, best grow the number of participating organizations? As I said, the the underlying data model continues to grow as we all contribute our our own, technology and financial performance data to this. And we we all learn, and it becomes a more valuable consensus based data model for us to leverage. So, there's value in bringing more organizations into the program. So number of different choices here, and we're just interested in your thoughts on what what is the best way forward for us to continue to promote this and continue to make sure that everybody is getting, awareness and access to this research.

So we'll give you a minute to, think about those options. Nicole, any thoughts on, your end as you yourself have brought this out to new member organizations? Are there things that we should be thinking about or could be doing to make sure that we're getting this into the hands of the people that need it?

I think the webinar and the conference presentations, I know from just at the conferences I've been at, I I think you you you get a large number of people who are who are eager to to to see the the latest and the greatest. And, I I would say that would be my my number one. But advertising as well and even, you know, the social media aspects.

Okay.

Well, this is telling, increased webinar and conference presentation, so we will continue to lean in on that. That has to be transparent, that has been our primary.

HFA has been a phenomenal partner in helping us bring this, awareness to of this to to the market, and we're can gonna continue to do that.

Expanding free access through IT and financial management organization, consulting firms is another area where we're leaned in very heavily, and so we'll continue to do that as well. So that's really, reassuring that though those are your primary channels because those are really where we've been predominantly focused.

Q&A Session and Participant Engagement

So at this point, we have about ten minutes left on the conversation. We can open it up to questions.

If anybody wants more information on accessing our RCMTAM, you can, follow that QR code in the bottom left hand corner, and that will bring you to an area where you get more information.

You can also reach out to me or Nicole or, find more information about our RCMTAM on the HFMA web page or our own webpage.

Awesome. Thank you to our speakers for that engaging presentation.

I would like to remind those listening to enter your questions in the q and a box located on your computer screens.

So first question, and Jeff just answered that, was where can we find the free tool? So as you mentioned, there's that little QR code, at the bottom of the the screen there. And then, of course, on HFMA's website and on FinThrive's website, you can find more information.

Next question was, how does this compete with or complement the Epic Gold Stars report for those on Epic?

Yeah. That's a great question. We actually get that question pretty regularly.

So we worked with epic organizations, UCSD, which we talked about throughout this session, but, a number of others just to make sure that the scope of what we were measuring was truly broader than the capabilities that you can turn on or turn off within an epic, implementation. And so our focus has been that this is vendor agnostic, including Corey HR. So we've actually, sort of back in the lab, have been doing much more research on, what is where are EHR vendors delivering RCM technology well? What is what is the satisfaction overall satisfaction level and and native EHR utilization within an Epic shop or a Meditech shop or an Oracle Health shop?

And then where are third parties coming in to to supplement those? And it's different for every, EHR vendor, and it's even different for every organization. Some organizations, will will be satisfied with native Epic capabilities and some won't. And they'll bring third parties in to support, capabilities that Epic provides natively.

And so the Epic's analysis is helpful in triangulating capabilities within Epic that you can use to improve financial performance. RCMTAM, I would see as a broader snapshot of your technology opportunity.

And the technologies that are on that road map really are just based on in industry revenue cycle leaders telling us, really where the most important pieces are. So it's not through the lens of a specific vendor.

Great. Thank you. Next question. What does the process to complete the RCMTAM assessment take, and how long does it take?

Sure. So, Nicole, you can jump in on this one too because you you went through it firsthand. From my end, I would say, it can be very fast or it can be slow. It's really just dependent on how you wanna tackle it. I we always offer kickoff calls so that we can walk through what this process is gonna look like. Some organizations find that helpful. Others just wanna hit the ground running, and we're happy to support both.

You can do the RCMTAM intake assessment online. There's a there's a digital tool that you can work your way through. We're also happy to send you PDF versions or Word doc versions that you can share internally and collaborate on. What you'll need is purview into the technologies that are running in the front, in your, middle, in back office, your analytics program, and your overall financial performance.

So you're going to need inputs from a number of different people within your organization, unless you're gonna be able to get your CRO or your VP of RCM to sit down and knock all this out themselves. So if what we recommend is that you come together as a group, and then you assign one person as the point person to set meetings with each of the departmental directors and capture, their part of this overall intake assessment. If you do that, it's about a thirty minute call with each of them so you can have this done. If one person does it, you can have this done in a couple of hours.

So it's not a multi day like what a consulting firm experience would be like.

The other approach that we found works is if you're having standing leadership meetings within your rev cycle leadership team, pull pull the digital version up in one of those meetings, and then just work through it as a team, and you can usually get to the finish line in forty five minutes to an hour.

If you're running into any difficulties where the doors are always open. So you're you're gonna see as you go through that intake process that there's avenues for you to raise your hand and ask for clarification or help, and we're happy to jump in, set up a meeting, and and help clarify anything.

Yeah. And I'll I'll just add a little bit to that because I'm I'm smiling because I've had it all with those different types of ways. I filled it out myself, and I I've done it digitally.

I've had CFOs try to fill it out in a PDF form.

And as Jeff said, you you will need a broad spectrum of information. So if if you have someone, from rev cycle, it's probably gonna be your best bet to quickly complete it. But, avenues for for q and a, like Jeff said, that, you know, they assist, but as well, I I think it's comfort level. It's really just a survey of your of your facility and then submitting it and getting the return product. So digital, PDF, there's various different ways to complete it.

Great. Thank you.

Insights from the RCMTAM Program

Next question. Have there been any interesting insights that have come from running this program for the last year? Anything you've learned that was unexpected or interesting?

I thought that, yes. So I thought that the most interesting thing that we learned coming out of this and actually continues to be reinforced as we work with organizations was, we had the perspective that safety net organizations would be, disproportionately under leveraging technology. And, in fact, the opposite has proved to be true. Safety net hospitals are disproportionately high users of technology.

They are disproportionately in those stage four and stage five categories. And, initially, we just thought that was cool, and we wanted to learn more. So we scheduled follow-up calls and discussed and had focus groups with these safety net hospitals. And what we learned was that their perspective is that they cannot afford to let a manual process exist if there is a solution to that that, will allow them to optimize it.

It they can't afford to let, processes go on in a manual state. It's just not sustainable for them. And so there's a significant amount of technology deployment and automation deployment that we didn't anticipate seeing as those safety net carve out analysis started, to get underway.

Great. Thank you.

And next question, how do RCM leaders that have used this balance what capabilities they are getting from their EHR versus from third party vendors, and how do you reconcile those two elements?

Yeah. I can take a pass, and then you could take a pass from from I mean, Nicole, you've got or you maybe you wanna start because you have so many different EHR vendors in your organization.

Yes. And I I would say, you know, one thing that I did is be very careful that I I would analyze what the capability is of the current EHR. You know, it might and I I just went through this yesterday. So, you know, there was maybe eligibility can be done in a certain EHR.

But is it quality data that we're getting back? Is it real time data that we're getting back? And that was you know, you just have to make for sure that you're balancing the two out. You know, is it if you don't have to have a separate system or a separate vendor, great.

But if it's not doing everything it needs to do, then that's where you have to take a hard look at the capabilities of your EHR. Some can and some can't.

Yep. We find the same.

When so as a result of sort of growing dataset, we're starting to have visibility into overall satisfaction levels and capabilities levels, and we can we can parse that from EHR to EHR. So we've done additional research also with HFMA, also with HIMSS, and pulled in additional, in, datasets to start informing, where where is Epic satisfactorily supporting revenue cycle leaders? Where is Meditech? Where is Cerner in this story? Where are those organizations going third party and finding overall greater satisfaction? And we're we're in the process of of sort of cleaning that raw data up and preparing that for publication. But the intent of that work really was to answer that very question is, how do I know where others are successfully leveraging native EHR capabilities, versus looking at looking at the market for, a third party solution?

So more to come on that front, but we're, for the time being, I do think that having having a conversation with your EHR vendor and your revenue cycle leaders about current satisfaction levels, can be very telling. And a part of the RCMTAM intake is, taking an inventory of your high dissatisfaction areas so that you have that information at your fingertips, and it supports that kind of analysis.

Great. Thank you. And do either of you have any closing remarks?

Closing Remarks and Future Directions

I'll let you leave, Nicole.

I I would just say, you know, thank you all for for your time today, and please feel free. My contact information is listed here. If I can answer any questions, in any of the stages or anything we've talked about today, please feel free to reach out. We found it very beneficial.

And I would echo that. If anybody has any questions or wants additional information, you have my contact information here. You're welcome to reach out.

And thank you for taking time to more learn more about our RCMTAM. We really did develop this to bring voices to the revenue cycle leaders just like yourselves and make sure that as we are pouring investment dollars into the revenue cycle space, that is being done strategically, and it is forwarding our industry through the lessons learned from yourselves. So we're appreciative of the input that you bring to programs like RCMTAM, and we take our responsibility to report that back out to the market seriously. And so thank all of you for coming.