Tag: Revenue Cycle Management

In the healthcare industry, transparency is everything — you want your patients to be as informed as possible every step of the way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen with pricing, leaving both patients and providers unsure what the final bill is going to be. That’s where Experian Health’s Patient Estimates tool comes in. With this solution, you can provide your patients with timely, accurate projections of the costs of their care either before or at the point of service. By better preparing patients for their bill, Patient Estimates helps you avoid the underpayment problems you’re likely all too familiar with, leaving you more time to focus on providing the care that really matters. The power of accuracy The pricing process in healthcare is complicated. Constantly translating the shifting policies of insurers, suppliers, and partner organizations requires a level of attention that healthcare providers are rarely able to spare. But unless you thoroughly understand all the details that go into a pricing estimate, the only thing you can really offer is speculation. And patients are stressed enough as it is; the last thing they want to worry about is whether their costs are going to unexpectedly skyrocket once the bill comes. Each projection that comes from the Patient Estimates tool undergoes several data-gathering stages before delivering any results. Patient Estimates collects information from the patient’s insurance provider, including claims history and payer contract terms, as well as the hospital's chargemaster price. This data is automatically posted to a centralized work list, which can be customized by a healthcare provider depending on its needs. Imagine you need a price estimate for a patient who needs a common procedure or you’re trying to pinpoint the costs of a very specific procedure. You can narrow your search in the Patient Estimates platform to match your patient’s unique situation, and then you can easily pull that pricing information back up at any time. Most importantly, this data is equally accessible for your patients — you can print estimates in a variety of languages or customize scripts for your staff to read. As altruistic as this all sounds, Patient Estimates isn’t just a way to fulfill an ever-increasing obligation of state mandates for price transparency. Getting accurate pricing estimates slashes the time you’d spend manually updating pricing lists and scrambling to create an audit trail for a patient. By automating this grunt work and providing accurate upfront information, Patient Estimates can make your collections process easy and efficient — not two words you typically associate with collections. “The tool is really behind a lot of our success with billing and quick client payments,” says the Baylor University College of Medicine’s director of patient access. “Partnering with Experian Health has allowed us to be an advocate for our patients while also protecting our bottom line.” Patient Estimates isn't just a useful resource for patients; it's also an efficient tool providers can use to avoid age-old payment problems. After all, your organization runs on payments, and you’d hate to miss out on essential revenue because you didn’t give your patients accurate information in the first place. Bundle up Combining Patient Estimates with other Experian Health services can extend the benefits across a wider range of services. Patient Estimates connects with Eligibility, for example, to generate up-to-date benefits information that can inform a patient's treatment plan. It also works in lockstep with our Contract Manager solution to price estimates based on a provider’s payer contract, no matter how complicated it is. The College of Medicine at Baylor University is among the providers that use Contract Manager to analyze contracts throughout clinical practice departments. After adopting Experian Health's product suite, the school overhauled its internal collections strategy and generated more than 18,000 patient estimates while collecting $4.2 million in contractual underpayments it would have previously missed. Baylor has used its package of Experian Health products not only to streamline its workflow, but also to improve its patient collections rate and negotiate stronger contracts. You don’t have to draw a hard line between helping your patients and making a profit. In fact, the two go hand in hand when you take the right steps. With Patient Estimates, everybody can get on the same page. Contact our team today to find out how to boost transparency in your organization. To learn more about Baylor University College of Medicine’s experience with price transparency, please download this case study.

As most doctors will say, healthcare is about helping patients, not making money. However, these two goals aren't as separate as some would assume. In order to help their patients, healthcare providers need to buy equipment, pay salaries, and spend money to maintain an effective, efficient customer experience. Revenue is what makes healthcare work, so preserving revenue should be a main priority for healthcare administrators. That's how Stacy Calvaruso, assistant vice president of patient services and revenue cycle at Louisiana Children's Medical Center (LCMC) Health, approaches her job. "Revenue preservation is a term that we use in our organization to talk about how we're going to ensure that we're maintaining all the money that we can possibly collect for the services that we provide for our community," Calvaruso says. "Everyone is being asked to do more with less, and patient access or the revenue cycle is no different than the clinical areas. We have to ensure that we're able to collect all the money and all the income that we generate as an organization so that we can put more money back into the community to provide more services to more patients." For help with revenue preservation, Calvaruso's team uses Experian Health's revenue cycle management tools. The full suite of Experian Health's revenue management products help LCMC Health facilitate patient access, manage contracts, process and submit claims, and streamline collections. Here's a closer look at how Experian Health approaches each stage of the revenue preservation process. Patient Access With 86 percent of leading medical practices seeing an increase in payer prior authorization, having accurate and comprehensive patient data is crucial to getting patients the treatment they need with fewer denials from insurers. Experian Health can help by verifying patient information at the point of service. From there, automated software coordinates patient data across all connected facilities so customers, doctors, and insurers are better informed about possible treatment options and how much they're likely to cost, eliminating any surprises in the payment or collections process. According to Calvaruso, a transparent process helps to prevent repeated work, which is a major cause of revenue loss. "Instead of calling a patient after the fact about a denial or incorrect insurance information, we're able to call them on the front end to let them know that we've verified their benefits, we know what the estimate of their out-of-pocket payment is going to be, we've talked to their doctor, and we're ready for them to come and have these services," she says. Experian Health's Patient Access tools make it quick and easy to find the right information and avoid miscommunications and delays that affect revenue preservation. Hospital staff will be grateful for the lightened workflow and improved outcomes for both customers and administrators. Contract Management One of the most common clogs in revenue collection comes from unclear contract management. Without the right data to analyze contract compliance, hospitals will struggle to get accurate payments from insurers and customers. Calvaruso says that one of the cornerstones of her revenue preservation philosophy is reducing the avoidable denials; Experian Health's contract management tools can analyze and audit contracts to ensure payer compliance and clarify anything that could lead to such a denial. Experian Health's contract management tools also provide patients with more accurate estimates of treatment costs. One recent survey of 54 hospitals found that getting a price estimate is a frustrating process for patients; another poll found that 46 percent of younger patients aren't paying their full bill at the point of service because they didn't have an accurate cost estimate. Having accurate contract management data can make a big difference at both the point of service and in later payment collections. Experian Health's contract management tools can not only increase the revenue a hospital collects, but they can also improve the financial experience and build better relationships with customers and insurers. Claims Everybody makes mistakes, but given the amount of stress that healthcare providers are under, it's more likely that they'll make mistakes on routine paperwork like claims forms, which can lead to the kind of rework that hospitals loathe and that eats away at revenue. On top of that, without a streamlined system in place, it's often unclear where the initial problem occurred, which means administrators can't correct the problem for next time. "We make sure we've done all the work in the beginning to prevent the rework," Calvaruso says. "One way we can do that is by using that lean process that assists us with identifying where we can improve." Experian Health's solutions helped Calvaruso develop that type of process. ClaimSource helps organizations prioritize the claims that need immediate attention, which saves time and reduces the number of tardy claim submissions. To avoid errors in the claims themselves, Experian Health's Claims Scrubber® makes sure clean claims are submitted the first time, eliminating the dreaded rework. Collections Submitting new claims after denials is aggravating, but bad debt write-offs are even more harmful to revenue preservation — it's money that the organization will never see, no matter how much more work is put in. The only way to ensure accurate collections is to minimize the risk of denial in the first place. As Calvaruso says, a key component of preserving revenue is moving back-office work to the front end. For collections, this means accurately verifying patient identity and analyzing litigation risks. Of course, not every situation can be accounted for, and there will always be issues with collections, Experian Health's collections solutions make it easier for organizations to prioritize their past-due accounts and pursue them effectively. No healthcare organization will ever receive 100 percent of the revenue it's due, but taking the right steps to preserve revenue can mitigate much of the loss and keep things running smoothly. With healthy revenue management, healthcare providers can better help the people who need them most.

In an ideal healthcare world, third-party payers would always make payments accurately and on time. Unfortunately, human error is unavoidable, so missed payments and underpayments happen. Identifying and correcting these inaccurate payments often falls to healthcare providers, and without a strategy to make sure payers are complying with your contract terms, these errors are bound to cause stress and volatility to your revenue cycle. There are, of course, external causes of underpayment that a provider can't necessarily control, such as payers misinterpreting contract terms or incorrectly calculating a payment. Providers, however, can counteract this by limiting internal mistakes like incorrect billing or failure to provide appropriate documentation. Still, it’s easy to let incorrect or late payments slip through the cracks, especially without a robust contract management system. Experian Health's Contract Manager and Contract Analysis tools can help providers make sure they're reimbursed quickly and accurately. How Contract Manager and Contract Analysis eliminate payment problems Experian Health's Contract Manager for Hospitals and Health Systems verifies the amounts owed for all applicable claims, monitors payer compliance, and models the financial implications of proposed contracts. And because Contract Manager’s data processing and storage is completely remote, providers get 24/7 web-based access with no capital investments required and no added cost for software or data updates. Contract Manager helped Timothy Daye, director of managed care contracting and reimbursement at Duke Private Diagnostic Clinic, part of the Duke University School of Medicine, identify underpayments and discover ways to avoid them in the future. “In addition to identifying underpayments,” Daye said, “there’s tremendous value in identifying billing issues that may result in underpayments and also identifying process improvements that can be implemented to eliminate the underpayments in the first place.” Contract Manager alone can identify and prevent late payments and underpayments, but when providers pair it with its companion solution, Experian Health's Contract Analysis, they can find added data and negotiating power to set contract terms that optimize third-party reimbursement. Because you don’t have a crystal ball to predict how all of the hundreds of variables in third-party contracts will affect payment, you need a contingency plan. That's where Contract Analysis comes in. By spotting unfavorable contract terms and offering real-world “what if” scenarios, Contract Analysis tells you exactly how proposed contracts with payers might affect your revenue cycle. You’ll know before signing on the dotted line how each part of the contract will play out. The Contract Manager and Contract Analysis combination allows you to audit payer contract performance to ensure compliance and maximize revenue. You could, for example, use it to check the accuracy of a reimbursement by comparing the expected payment to the actual payment, or you could recover from underpayments by finding lost revenue with data-driven insight. Contract Manager and Contract Analysis can also help you identify unusual causes of underpayments. For instance, when Daye and his team were working on a recent anesthesia project, they had to correct a non-standard billing situation. “The payer was taking a reduction by billing the QS modifier, which is outside of the norm of standard billing protocol,” Daye says. “We changed that process through the appeal with the payer by showing documentation that the QS modifier was informational only and doesn't warrant a reduction in payment." Had Daye and his team not been able to identify this system issue, they’d still be scrambling to determine why the payment was lower than they were expecting. However, by using Contract Manager and Contract Analysis, Daye was able to pinpoint an outside-the-norm situation and correct the payment discrepancy as quickly as possible. What makes the combo unique The Contract Manager and Contract Analysis combination is essential for any healthcare provider wanting to ensure it receives payments that are accurate and on time. By using proprietary valuation logic, these tools will give you more precise insight into your contracts, giving you a solid foundation to protect against any payment problems. Experian Health reimbursement specialists even offer complete contract maintenance to make things easier. Whether it's a coding typo or a misinterpreted contract item, there will always be some factor that could cause a payment error. And while you can’t control some of these unforeseen hiccups, you can use Experian Health's Contract Manager and Contract Analysis solutions to correct them in the most reliable, efficient way possible.

Experian Health will be at HFMA ANI again this year–booth 1025–at the Venetian-Palazzo Sands Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kristen Simmons, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Innovation, Consumer Experience, and Marketing, with Experian Health, chatted with Joe Lavelle of IntrepidNOW to provide her insights on this year’s HFMA ANI conference, consumerism in healthcare and much more! Excerpt below: Experian Health booth activities  "[In our booth this year at HFMA ANI, we want to focus] around peer to peer learning and exchanges, so we are doing less selling and more engaging and more understanding. Understanding folks problems and helping to collectively arrive at solutions. We are doing a lot this year in terms of hands on demos of our solutions. We'll be showing some of our patient engagement products which include, self-service portals and mobile options for getting price estimates for applying for charity care, and setting up payment plans. Likewise, on the revenue cycle management side to automate orders with patient access functionality, contract management claims and collections, all those types of things that we do to improve efficiency and increase reimbursement for our clients. We'll also be showing off some of our identity management capabilities to match, manage, and protect patient identities so we can safe guard medical information and reduce risks for our clients. And on the care management side, our early support and sharing of post acute patient care information to help providers succeed as we all move forward into a value based paradigm." How Experian Health is addressing the need for consumerism in healthcare  "When it comes to consumerism, it's interesting when you're a company that has a lot of data and a lot of capabilities to say, 'Hey what can we do for people?' One of the things we really wanted to look at for our consumer approach, was to say, 'What is it that needs to be done?' We had some great hypotheses coming in and a lot of those were borne out but we actually undertook a big national study to take a look at what consumers biggest pain points were. It has a qualitative and a quantitative component. But, we basically looked at the entire healthcare journey so we weren't just asking them about the administrative and financial aspects of care, but also the clinical aspects. As we walked through the journey and were able to get a lot of quantitative data about all these different aspects of their healthcare journey, what actually turned out to be the most painful for the most people, were all the things around the financial equation. And, so clearly there can be pain in a clinical side, especially if you're unhealthy, you've got something chronic, you've got something terminal. There's all kinds of awful situations there but, really affecting almost everyone is a lot of the pain around the financial aspect of healthcare. So, we were able to look closely at some of those pain points and decide on some of the biggest ones that we wanted to tackle." How Experian Health is helping providers address financial pain points for patients and providers "Some of the big pain points for people is just the fact that you don't know what you're going to owe and as the patient portion of responsibility increases, understanding what you're going to be paying becomes more and more important to a consumer. So, understanding what I owe earlier, being transparent, and then helping me pay, those are some of the areas. And there are others but those are some of the absolute biggest pain points. And as you pointed out with some of our propensity to pay analytics, and some of the other capabilities that we have, we're able to help providers understand the financial situation patients are in much earlier in the process so they can get them to the right kind of funding sources. They can give them peace of mind so that they know what they're paying upfront, which may impact when they choose to go in for a major procedure or how they might want to save up for it or how they might want to access different funding sources." Listen to the full podcast

Last year, a Kaiser Family Foundation study revealed that employer-based health insurance deductibles in the U.S. were at an average of $1,505. In 2006, the average was only $303. During this span of 11 years, the majority of responsibility for healthcare costs shifted from insurance companies to patients themselves, and many are still reeling from the sticker shock. Before consumerism and routinely high deductibles, healthcare providers focused most of their collection efforts on health insurance companies. Now, patients are a main source of providers' revenue, and some organizations are struggling to fit their old revenue cycles into the new payment landscape. However, many patients aren’t prepared for the increasingly high costs of healthcare, so they may opt to delay their care until they’ve met their deductibles at the end of the year. This creates a volatile and unpredictable revenue cycle in which organizations are slow in quarter one and quarter two and then slammed in quarter three and quarter four. Other patients could forgo medical care altogether, cutting down revenue for providers. Both scenarios contribute to a less healthy general populace and a vicious cycle in which more patients need increased care but most of them continue to hesitate or refuse it. At Experian Health, we recognize and want to bring change to this unstable healthcare climate. Our healthcare price transparency tools take sticker shock completely out of the equation by stabilizing the revenue cycle and putting transparent pricing in healthcare and payment options at the forefront. Applying consumerism to transparent pricing in healthcare Healthcare might have been a bit slow to catch up, but modern consumerism has already changed virtually every other industry. Today, consumers demand to know what they’re paying for and exactly how much before any transactions are complete. They need payment options that make their lives simpler and the ability to manage their accounts conveniently online without jumping through hoops. All of this is possible for healthcare organizations to provide, but they must be proactive in helping patients overcome the burden associated with modern healthcare costs. From financial education to flexible financing programs, any organization can improve patient satisfaction by providing transparent price information and affordable solutions upfront. With that goal in mind, Experian Health offers a variety of healthcare price transparency tools that can set your organization on the path to financial clarity, education, and advocacy: Patient Estimates A high medical bill is stressful alone, but it’s infinitely more so when the amount of the bill far exceeds what a patient expected. Price transparency is paramount to overcoming that stress. It’s also mandated in several states and will soon be in all others. With Patient Estimates, you can deliver transparent pricing in healthcare to every patient before or at the point of service. Our Patient Estimates tool automatically generates estimates based on treatment costs, payer rates, and a patient’s eligibility for benefits. The platform takes the guesswork out of the process by automatically storing and populating this information so you can provide patients with highly accurate estimates as early as possible.   Patient Statements When patients know what price to expect on their medical bills, they’re more prepared to pay them. Yet if they can’t read or understand the bill, they might still delay paying it until they have time to thoroughly address any concerns. To simplify the final bill, we offer Patient Statements software that combines separate billings into one simple, easy-to-understand statement. Patient Statements not only simplifies a patient’s bill, but it also helps you turn it into a valuable engagement tool. Every statement can be personalized with educational information about the patient’s condition, links to relevant videos and websites, and marketing messages for products that can improve the patient’s quality of life. Patient Self-Service Consumers are used to going online and managing their finances from a smartphone or computer. They often choose retailers based on this availability, and soon, most will choose healthcare providers on the same basis. Giving them convenient, 24/7 access to their healthcare accounts through Patient Self-Service portals will become increasingly more important for organizations to stay competitive. An online, self-service portal allows patients to view their estimates, manage their integrated fundraising accounts, pay their bills, and stay up-to-date with changes to their healthcare. Our self-service healthcare price transparency tools are also protected by highly secure payment processing technology, so patients can be confident that their information is closely guarded every time they interact with the platform. PaymentSafe® Collecting healthcare payments requires the combined security of protected health information and a patient’s personal and financial data. Our comprehensive PaymentSafe solution makes it possible to safely and conveniently collect payments at any point in the care cycle and from any department within the organization. Every payment is automatically settled throughout the system, as well, so patients are never double-billed. PaymentSafe also applies to every type of remittance — from electronic checking and debit cards to cash, checks, and money orders. In addition to satisfying information safety compliance standards, the technology gives patients peace of mind and encourages them to be more proactive in settling their healthcare bills. Transforming your revenue cycle to make it more consumer-centric and price transparent can seem like a daunting task, especially in an industry in which every small change has resounding consequences. At Experian Health, we’ve made it our mission to make that transformation easier by helping organizations provide the healthcare price transparency tools and payment options that their patients demand.

No two healthcare organizations are the same. Each has varied workflows that optimize efficacy and overall care for patients. That’s why healthcare software solutions should never be considered one-size-fits-all approaches. It isn’t fair, or terribly productive, to force healthcare organizations to adapt to new software. Rather, the healthcare software should adapt to them. At Experian Health, we’ll never supply a software product and then expect you to adjust workflows to suit it. Instead, we embed ourselves into your company to ensure we deeply understand your productivity needs and the reasons behind them. Only then can we tailor the solution we provide around you. It’s never too early to get it right The conversation about customizing your healthcare organization's solution begins before you even sign up. As soon as a solution interests you, we’ll start looking at how to tailor it to your unique needs. We’ll hold a meeting that includes subject matter experts and implementation leadership groups to uncover your greatest usability needs. Then, we’ll document those needs to better prepare whoever runs your project and ensure he or she has all the necessary information upfront. Then, gears start moving during the sales process. After choosing a solution, our team of experts works with members from every department in your organization to iron out the appropriate design and functionality details. We believe the people who will be using and relying on the solution every day should have a significant say in these details. However, we’ll do all the legwork of actually building and implementing the solution itself. By the time we’re ready to run internal tests to make sure the software works, members of every department will already know what to expect. Consequently, when they run user acceptance tests to check whether the solution fits into their workflows, they can accurately measure the solution’s performance against their input into its design. Afterward, we can iron out any hiccups they run into before initiating the organizationwide training and “go live” steps of the process. It’s never too late to make adjustments Our deep involvement in customizing your solution also begins before you select it, and it continues long after it's successfully implemented. We don’t go away just because we marked you as “live.” Instead, we understand that the healthcare industry is in constant flux and you might experience operational changes that warrant additional tinkering and tailoring to our solutions. We’ll stick around for a couple of days after going live, and we’ll stay available forever after, just in case. For example, if you purchase a new physician group six months after going live, you’ll face quite an uphill battle onboarding them all into your software system and, in turn, getting them up to speed. Because the group is new, you might face opposition to bringing on any change in general. In this case, you could use help facilitating the training and the adoption of your system into this new group, and that's where we step in. Additionally, what if this implementation requires a work queue structure that’s vastly different from yours? If the new group operates in a different area of the state, they might also have unique rules for some of their payers. These rules have to be incorporated into their system to accommodate the patient population. None of this, though, should fall solely on your shoulders. We can worry about the system's features so you can focus on the operational change management aspect. For our clients, we’re always on call. This devoted availability could range from six months or even six years. Whatever the situation, we know that you’ll eventually face circumstances that your software wasn’t originally designed to address. Instead of feeling stuck and frustrated, clients can find comfort in knowing we are here for every step of the process. And beyond tailoring your solution before implementing it, we also offer continued customization to help you tackle new circumstances without compromising workflow. Overall, here at Experian Health, we understand the pressures facing healthcare organizations today, and we are eager to be partners with you in securing the best solution for you needs and guiding you through the challenges ahead.

Seven years ago, Bill's healthcare group invested in a new health information system, and the dust still hasn’t quite settled. Like most health information system providers, Bill's vendor communicates mostly through the group’s IT leader. He has to pick and choose what updates and features are implemented, and the people who work with the system daily are expected to figure out how to make the most out of it. Fortunately, Bill and the head of IT are great pals. They eat lunch together, go out for after-work cocktails, and try to bridge the gap between their healthcare software vendor and the end users on the frontline. But Bill shouldn’t have to rely on that friendship for his healthcare team members to be able to do their jobs, and it shouldn't have taken seven years for the software to be properly integrated. Bill's not a real person, and his healthcare group is fictitious, but both are archetypes of the new healthcare landscape. Constant market changes and ongoing challenges have forced healthcare systems to partner more closely with medical software vendors. However, it’s challenging to find vendors that are willing to roll up their sleeves and work alongside the end users to design solutions that are tailored to their specific needs. At Experian Health, we want to make sure the first experience your team has with our health information system products is a positive one and that you all look forward to using them every day. Your group’s success is our top priority, and playing an active role in your onboarding process helps ensure that success. Providing health information systems and the knowledge to use them The problem with the archetype of Bill is that the end users in the group had to take on the tasks of learning and optimizing the system themselves. Trainers lacked the deep level of understanding needed to create enthusiasm about the system, and overall adoption lagged. By contrast, we know our solutions like the back of our hands, so it only makes sense for us to share that knowledge and collaborate to implement those solutions through medical software training. With years of experience under our belt working with healthcare organizations across the country, we’ve heard virtually every possible question end users ask. That experience gives us the flexibility to come up with on-the-fly solutions to challenges we haven’t thought of yet and suggest ways to optimize your group’s workflow with the system. We can offer shortcuts, tips, and tricks to make the system work more efficiently for your team. Collaborative onboarding lets our clients dive deeper into learning their new systems than they could by just reading predetermined lesson plans and FAQ lists. It helps us when we help you make the medical software training go smoother and ensure all end users actually want to use the product. In fact, for the first three to five months, Experian will be a physical presence at your organization, helping with change management and the onboarding process. Personalized, effective onboarding The process differs depending on how complex your organization is and what you’re installing, but typically, collaborative onboarding adheres to the following timeline: We start the process with a formal kickoff and demo to get executive leadership and everyone on the frontline up to speed. The demo lays out what the project will look like for the group and gives everyone the chance to start considering how to operationalize it for the organization. After the kickoff, our teams collaborate with specific subject matter experts and start digging into the nitty-gritty design and functionality detail work. We really stress the importance of operational input from people who will be champions for their specific areas, not just the IT teams. These champions need to communicate the details of the system’s design to their peers. When the design is complete, we do all of the heavy lifting to build the product, and then we conduct internal testing to make sure it works effectively. Next, we guide operational champions through user-acceptance testing to make sure the product meets their needs. User-acceptance testing occurs in a real-life, day-to-day setting so users can validate that it fits into their workflow. Once we iron out any changes warranted by the user-acceptance testing, we extend training into the larger workforce and officially go live. A month later, we come back and hold an optimization workshop to observe users in action. We can answer questions and provide suggestions on how to improve efficiency even further or make tweaks to improve user processes. With the rush to adopt faster and more efficient technology, many healthcare organizations have been left in the dust to figure out how to make new technology work best for them. At Experian Health, we stick around after software implementation to make sure your entire organization can hit the ground running. Our mission is to help the healthcare industry succeed in providing better, more comprehensive care to patients, and collaborative onboarding ensures our products do just that.

This is an exciting time for our industry, and agility and knowledge are critical for your organization to Lead the Way by meeting the growing expectations of patients and keeping pace with the ever-changing healthcare landscape. Since 2004, the Experian Health 2017 Financial Performance Summit has connected business leaders to discuss innovative ideas and solutions, allowing organizations to improve their overall financial performance and increase profits. Summit 2017 focused on collaboration, idea sharing and networking, with numerous sessions on how you can take control of your organization’s road map for growth and operational efficiency. The intimate setting of Summit 2017 allowed for unique networking opportunities, one-on-one conversations with subject matter experts and numerous breakout sessions that will provide valuable insights from industry thought leaders. The three-day Summit provided hands-on learning opportunities with product experts and the exchange of knowledge with peers in an engaging environment. The agenda featured industry-leading speakers, provider- and Experian Health-led educational sessions, a dedicated leadership track, one-on-one training, networking lunches and receptions, and evening events featuring live entertainment. Break-out sessions at the Summit covered: Claims Collections Contract Manager Patient Access Patient Engagement Price Transparency Thought Leadership If you attended the Financial Performance Summit about would like to download any of the presentations, they are available here. If you would like to attend one of our future events, please contact us.

Healthcare has always been driven by data, and today, providers have access to an unprecedented amount from a wide variety of sources. While this influx could be a blessing to the healthcare industry as a whole, it also poses a number of challenges, particularly when it comes to patient identity management. With a soaring volume of patient information coming in from numerous sources, identity errors become increasingly more likely, as well as the potential consequence of fatal mistakes. Keeping this in mind, the importance of effective identity management cannot be overstated. Every year, an estimated 195,000 people die due to medical mistakes. More than half of those deaths – 10 out of every 17 – are the result of identity management errors, such as duplicate records and mistaken patient identities. While current healthcare IT solutions attempt to tackle these discrepancies, they only succeed in identifying about 10 percent of all duplicate records. Consequently, patients often undergo repeated tests or receive incorrect treatment or medication that can result in adverse effects to their health. Also, there is limited coordination of patient data throughout the healthcare ecosystem. The main culprit of this is the lack of secure data transfers that compromise patient records and identity. This raises the question: How can healthcare organizations better manage the massive amounts of data related to each patient’s medical identity? Luckily, such issues can be improved with Experian Health’s Universal Identity Manager (UIM), which creates a single identity for individual patients across multiple disparate healthcare databases. Upgrade your identity management system The ability to share patient information across multiple healthcare organizations with different care management programs is at the core of optimizing overall patient care. Properly utilizing patient and population health data can dramatically improve an organization’s efficiency, raise its quality of care, and lower its readmissions rate. For patient data to be useful, however, providers require a robust infrastructure that allows for secure, precise, and accurate storage of patient data. The same framework should be able to assign patients unique identities across the entire network. In turn, a single, universal patient identity system allows for better analytical insights and more effective care personalization. This kind of management system also allows an organization to add relevant data to a patient’s medical profile faster and more accurately, creating an improved dynamic database that can develop personalized patient engagement and care plans. How Experian Health’s universal identity management software helps Administrative slip-ups in healthcare can have drastic consequences for a patient’s health and wellbeing. Eliminating these inaccuracies is the main goal of Experian Health’s UIM solution. Experian Health has the benefit of leveraging data assets available to us from being part of broader Experian. As a result, the identity management software generates and assigns a unique identifier to each patient that remains consistent across various healthcare systems, such as hospitals, therapeutic facilities, pharmacies, and healthcare payers. Drawing on decades of experience in identity management, Experian Health's multi-matching methodology approach eliminates duplicate and erroneous data through comprehensive search and alert processes. It provides a high degree of likeliness because it expands beyond the limitations of the conventional single-matching methodology that most health systems use today. Even records created on disparate healthcare systems can be automatically analyzed and assigned to the appropriate patient identity. In addition to eliminating discrepancies that could affect the quality of patient care, universal identity management also reduces medical and billing errors, ultimately minimizing an organization's risk of fraud. The solution also works in tandem with Experian Health’s suite of patient engagement and transparency tools, including its Patient Self-Service portal, to further optimize an organization’s ability to deliver personalized, high-quality care. Unique patient identifiers are critical for healthcare organizations to reduce the risks of inaccurate and duplicate records that lead to errors and low-quality care. Combined with Experian Health's suite of patient engagement and price transparency tools, its identity management software is a leap toward making efficient and reliable interoperability more possible across the healthcare ecosystem.