Revenue Cycle Performance: Revenue Cycle Compass

The Revenue Cycle Compass program provides chief financial officers and patient financial services executives with measurement and analytics to drive improved collections and accounts receivable performance. The program increases visibility into revenue cycle performance drivers and comparative benchmarks through a unique Web-based analytical tool, as well as best practice research support. This combination of services allows revenue cycle leaders to achieve breakthrough reductions in days of accounts receivable, bad debt, denials, and lost charges.

Successes

With over 300 hospitals participating in our Revenue Cycle Compass program, we have driven significant improvements in collections, denials, and accounts receivable performance, including:

  • Reducing accounts receivable days by 14%
  • Reducing aged accounts receivable days by 17%
  • Increasing point-of-service cash collections by 50%
  • Reducing denial write-offs by 32%

Methodology

Our business intelligence programs merge innovative technology with our world-renowned best practice knowledge and experience. This combination of tools drives the identification of key performance variances, isolates root causes, and provides solutions to capitalize on opportunities for improvement.

Our Technology Platform

By combining high-level dashboards and the ability to easily perform analyses by clicking into account-level detail, our best-in-class technology platform allows for immediate diagnosis of the root causes driving each member’s specific revenue cycle performance and the opportunities to improve collections, denials, and accounts receivable.

A few examples of the types of analyses included in our library of reports are as follows:

Cash Collection Reports

  • Trended Point-of-Service Cash Collections by Location/Service
  • Trended Cash Collections by Collector

Denials Reports

  • Denials by Discharge Date
  • Denied Accounts Receivables by Reason
  • Denied Charges by Month
  • Denial Trends by Reason
  • Denial Trends by Location

Accounts Receivable Reports

  • Outstanding Accounts Receivable by Biller
  • Age from Final Bill Date to Pay Date by Payer
  • Medicare Accounts Older than 180 Days

Bad Debt and Self-Pay Reports

  • Bad Debt Write-Offs by Patient Type
  • Charity Care Write-Offs by Patient Type
  • Aged Self-Pay Accounts by Collector
  • Self-Pay Write-Offs by Service Area

Our Educational Services

It is our firm belief that information alone provides limited value. It takes ongoing training, support, and an understanding of how to capitalize on opportunities to drive true change for the organization. Therefore, the Advisory Board provides substantial services in conjunction with our technology to ensure that our members maximize their performance and integrate these tools into the cultural and operational fabric of their organizations.

Customized Services

Maximizing the Value for Each Member

The Advisory Board provides each member organization with a Dedicated Advisor. These Dedicated Advisors are part of a team at the Advisory Board that focuses on each member site to help maximize opportunity identification and realization through the following services:

  • Training and Onboarding
    Dedicated Advisors train hospital staff not just on how each tool functions, but more importantly on the analytics that allow each member to identify and realize opportunities independently.
  • Proactive Opportunity Identification and Realization
    Dedicated Advisors proactively identify additional opportunities for their member hospitals. By tapping into our 20 years of health care research, the advisors can not only probe each site to identify areas for improvement, but also provide our members with tactics that other organizations have used to realize specific gains.
  • Ongoing Site Customization
    Dedicated Advisors customize our members’ sites to better serve them as their reporting needs change over time. Because Dedicated Advisors are part of a large team of analysts at the Advisory Board, they have unfettered access to other organizations that have customized their sites, which allows the advisors to provide advice on how to change reports to best fit all member needs.
  • Performance Tracking and Benchmarking
    Dedicated Advisors assist each member hospital in benchmarking and tracking their own performance over time to not only demonstrate the value of specific interventions but also to help our members realize the opportunities surfaced over time.
  • Providing Access to Advisory Board Experts
    Dedicated Advisors help member hospitals answer pressing and difficult questions by providing access to the Advisory Board’s researchers and terrain experts.

Cohort Services

Enhancing the Experience Across a Group of Organizations

At the Advisory Board we believe that there is tremendous power in a network of members working toward common objectives. As a result, we facilitate quarterly teleconferences and annual summit meetings in each of our membership cohorts. On an ongoing basis, our Dedicated Advisors poll our membership to identify issues that are most pressing for each cohort. These issues are then addressed through the following services:

  • Annual Summit
    Each year, our team of researchers and Dedicated Advisors provides a “State of the Union” for our members to discuss the most pressing issues they are facing, illustrate successful interventions, and maximize the value of the technology’s continuously expanding capabilities. These sessions also provide an ideal opportunity for our members to learn from each other and to extract further value out of their participation in the program.
  • Quarterly Teleconferences
    Each quarter, our team of researchers, Dedicated Advisors, and members gather to share specific tactics and highlight opportunities for discrete areas of improvement.
  • Advisory Board Library of Best Practices
    With over 20 years of experience publishing cutting-edge health care strategy, management, and operations best practices, the Advisory Board is able to leverage our proprietary research library, containing more than 33,000 proven strategic and operational tactics, to aid each of our members in improving their performance.
  • Case Studies of Client Successes
    Our team of Dedicated Advisors continuously identifies members who have successfully tackled difficult issues and highlight those successes for the other participants in the cohort. Our users also demonstrate, for the benefit of our other members, how they achieved that success.
  • Benchmarking Across the Cohort
    Dedicated Advisors assist members in tracking their performance relative to the rest of the cohort by demonstrating benchmarks across key performance indicators.
  • Networking with Like-Minded Peers
    The quarterly teleconferences and annual summits present ideal opportunities for cohort members to gather and learn from each other, further enhancing their improvement opportunities.
  • Access to Industry Experts
    To provide maximum value to our members, the Advisory Board leverages our deep expertise and relationships to the benefit of the cohort by facilitating interactions with industry experts.