Conference Preview: Improving the Quality of Front Staff to Solve the Supply Challenge

Session Title: Improving the Quality of Front Staff to Solve the Supply Challenge

Presenter: Michael Maggard

Learning Lab: Series 5

Date/Time: May 5, 4:00 p.m.

About the Learning Lab

The criticality of Patient Access comes through determination of patient eligibility, entry of required billing data, collecting co-pays, coding and tracking claims and in many cases, representing the first face or interaction the patient has with the organization. Not handling any of these functions results in significant financial loss or patient satisfaction impact for the hospital. This presentation will show the importance of implementing an effective and efficient program to turn a hospital or community’s existing population into quality front staff in order to help solve the supply challenge. To enable this, Mission Health System will explain how they embarked on a program in partnership with nThrive to develop Patient Access staff organically by leveraging their local communities. Through a standardized onboarding and competency management program that uses eLearning, classroom instruction, and analytics, Mission Health System can now employ a “grow your own” approach to develop staff from the system’s community and internal organization. This project is aimed at improving quality, reducing cost, insuring a robust and strong revenue cycle, increasing patient satisfaction and providing a career path for Patient Access professionals.

After this session, the audience will understand how to deploy a “grow your own” approach by sourcing Patient Access staff from local community and non-traditional sources and develop and maintain a high-quality frontline workforce. Through Mission Health System’s story, they will gain a better understanding of the nature of the hospital’s struggle to attract and maintain a skilled frontline workforce and their unique approach to create an ongoing staff competency management program.

The Patient Access department is one of the most essential pieces to the financial and operational success of hospitals and facilities, namely because this team of professionals touches every patient that walks through the doors. It is imperative that hospitals recruit, retain and develop skilled revenue cycle staff for all essential revenue cycle functions. Thus, the very foundation of Patient Access is education. An educated frontline staff will lead to a strong hospital revenue cycle, especially where 40 percent of denials initiate in errors made in Patient Access. However, finding and retaining skilled frontline staff has been a challenge for many healthcare providers for many years, with Patient Access having some of the highest attrition of any role in the organization.