Revenue Cycle Management
Healthcare Blog

So when you outsource, what are you really buying?

In a past career I needed to develop a better revenue forecasting and goal model for a centralized recovery operation (I oversaw the Agency Management arm of that recovery operation). What I wanted was a model that could accurately forecast gross and net revenues, account for multiple product lines, quickly roll-up numbers (product line, division, corporate) and drill down on numbers (vendor, batch, month), and establish goals for vendors.

I’m in the consumer contact business. For purposes of this blog, consumers are patients, tenants, retail purchasers, utility customers, and student borrowers. My list could go on, but I’m sure my list conveys the point that a consumer is a consumer is a consumer (there’s just simply different types of consumers). A lot of the work my company does involves consumer customer service, consumer accounts receivable management, and consumer bad debt collections.

Work Design

When I brainstorm the attributes of good work design, I come up with the following shortlist:

1. All the work is planned and planned in advance of a start date

2. Everyone involved in the plan knows the plan
3. Work within the plan is broken down into logical parts
4. All the people doing the work have clear role assignments
5. All the people doing the work are properly trained
6. Everyone involved in the plan knows their respective accountabilities
7. Plans are documented and readily accessible
8. Revisions and changes are captured (dates, reasons), documented, and communicated
9. The plan utilizes simple metrics to comprehensively measure production
10. The plan utilizes simple metrics to comprehensively measure performance

Over the last twelve months I’ve had the real pleasure of sitting in on a number of Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and American Association of Healthcare Administrative Management (AAHAM) presentations.  From my perspective, the presentations are always first class – knowledgeable and insightful speakers, relevant topics, and real solutions to real problems. It’s also easy to see that the events are consistently well attended and that the audiences are always highly engaged.

Patient Satisfaction is a real hot topic in the healthcare industry these days. For obvious reasons, keeping patients satisfied has always been a top priority for healthcare providers. However, in addition to the already known risks of earning a bad reputation or losing patients to competitors, there's now the added risk of hazards like reduced reimbursement rates. 

“Tone at the top”

Tone at the top is accounting language that was developed to evaluate and address the business ethics of an organization.  It’s smart language because when something bad happens inside an organization, the definition differentiates the actions of a rogue employee vs. the modus operandi of an organization’s leaders.  

I just attended a conference as one of many vendors soliciting services to healthcare providers. Many decision makers who attended the conference talked about initiating a request for proposal (RFP) to organize and manage their vendor selection process. The event got me thinking about my own experiences with vendor selection processes. I wrote this blog to share my perspective.