Revenue Cycle Management
Healthcare Blog

When You Can And Can’t Send Someone To Collections

If you’ve been following our blogs recently, you are aware that we have been providing additional education that was included in our “10-Step Checklist To Maintain Your Tax Exempt Status”. This week, we are focusing on item #5 in the checklist that states: “We have refrained from engaging in extraordinary collections actions.” There is a lot to decipher in that verbiage, so let’s look at a few aspects of this requirement.

What Exactly Does "Widely Publicized" Entail?

In the previous blog, we focused on defining the Financial Assistance Policy (FAP), which will outline how your patients can get help, if they need it. The next step is to make sure your patients know that financial help is available. How? Well, according to the 501r, you are required to take measures to widely publicize the FAP. Here’s what that means:

How Will You Help Those In Need?

Charitable hospitals, being in the business of helping the less fortunate in their communities, are tasked with letting their patients know how they can qualify for financial help. Therefore, in order to remain tax-exempt, a charitable hospital must establish a Financial Assistance Policy (FAP).  

CHNA focus should be on “Community Health,” not just “health care”

A non-profit hospital’s community health needs assessment (CHNA), a critical part of 501(r) regulations, can be a huge, lengthy and collaborative undertaking - but for good reason.  Item 2 on our 10 Step Checklist is “We have an implementation strategy in place to meet the CHNA needs.” Or, in other words, “Here’s what we’re going to do about it.”

Ever since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) was enacted, hospitals and organizations have been inundated with a constant need to keep up with new information and implement strategies in accordance with regulations under the health care reform law. But the ongoing challenge is this “new information” doesn’t exactly provide a clear plan of action distinctly saying “This is what you need to do and this is how you need to do it”.

Outsourced solutions offered to hospitals by Business Process Outsourcing companies (BPOs) significantly reduce the need for in-house resources and relieve the stresses of trying to keep pace with the ever-changing healthcare landscape. Those solutions are particularly important when managing healthcare IT functions, because moving into 2015 and beyond, IT functions are changing more rapidly than ever before.

CFO’s Must Become The Pilots Of Healthcare

As hospitals strive to make the right investments in healthcare information technology, they often find themselves torn between two competing imperatives:

1. the need to limit the amount of money spent on IT or
2. the need TO spend money on IT (especially when it can help increase revenue)
   

Who’s in charge of leading your hospital through financial implications of the health care transition? How is this leader navigating the challenges? Is this person a team-player?

More often than not this leader is the CFO, and the past few years have presented major obstacles that have led to major shifts in responsibilities and goals for this position.

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) is decreasing healthcare reimbursements. Bottom line - CFO’s will be negatively impacted if they do not become aware of future challenges.

As organizations prepare for the implementation of ICD-10 this year, many healthcare CFOs are searching for creative strategies to mitigate anticipated decreases in Coder productivity, as well as ways to ramp up education and employ a larger hierarchy of staff members. But let’s face it, a strong denial management strategy is one of the most efficient solutions for minimizing the impact of productivity loss.