Conference Preview: The Omnichannel Approach to Unlocking Access

Session Title: The Omnichannel Approach to Unlocking Access

Presenters: Pamela Ravare

Learning Lab: Series 3

Date/Time: May 5, 10:15 a.m.

About the Learning Lab

I think we would all agree that we feel the pressure of consumerism as it relates to establishing better access to care. During this learning lab, I look forward to sharing how our organization has shifted its access-related efforts to a more systematic, omnichannel approach to unlocking access.

Our access vision is to establish our physician organization as the national leader for providing unparalleled access for our patients. Our working vision tenets for Patient Access start with meeting and exceeding our patients’ expectations with a differentiated yet predictable experience. In addition, we strive to maintain the integrity of our teaching and research mission while enhancing the patient experience and organize our operations to seamlessly deliver patients to our physicians, thereby liberating their time and expertise to provide care.

I would emphasize the importance of taking a hard look at access challenges from the patient’s perspective. Where are your access breakdowns? Like most hospital organizations, we faced challenges with pigeonholed leadership, fragmented decision-making and uncoordinated efforts with access initiatives in the organization.

Solving access challenges is a multidisciplinary effort. We had to gain a full understanding of our patient struggles with accessing care, identifying those areas and locations with bottlenecks around appointment scheduling, arrival and registration, wayfinding and provider delays. 

Our organization has undergone an access leadership evolution this past year. We have transitioned access accountability from a practice level to a medical group level by defining and differentiating access leadership in practice operations. We have leveraged technologies, centralized/standardized workflows and we have taken an omnichannel approach to appointment routes (online, chat, virtual visits, walk-ins and call center scheduling).

Unlocking access through open direct scheduling makes it easier for your patients to receive care and connect with your organization. Your overall approach will yield greater results in patient satisfaction and increased revenue.

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.

Conference Preview: The Role of Registration in Telehealth Services: It All Begins with Registration

Session Title: The Role of Registration in Telehealth Services:  It All Begins with Registration

Presenter: Brenda Sauer

Learning Lab: Series 1

Date/Time: May 4, 10:45 a.m.

About the Learning Lab

Telehealth services are increasing rapidly in many healthcare settings including Urgent Care and Emergency Departments. Patients continue to use the emergency department for care despite the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Emergency department volumes continue to grow year after year. Because a better solution was needed to manage patients in a busy emergency department, our healthcare system chose telehealth services. Why have telehealth services in a busy metropolitan teaching hospital? To improve patient throughput and patient satisfaction. These are the two main goals for any busy emergency room and the two main reasons we started this program at New York Presbyterian Hospital.

In this Learning Lab, you will learn about the two Telehealth programs at New York Presbyterian Hospital and the challenges we needed to overcome to have successful programs. These challenges included communication and working as a team with all team members in the emergency department, including physicians, nurses, information technology personnel and registration.

In this learning lab, you will learn how physicians and registrars learned to work together to overcome the communication, technical, and operational issues associated with starting a telehealth program. Losing or forgetting a patient in a virtual waiting room was only one of the challenges the group faced! Another challenge was teaching physicians how to manage or fix the camera so they can see their patient.

Teamwork, communication and respect between all of the parties were essential in making this program successful. As our Physician–in-Chief, Dr. Rahul Sharma, states, “One of the most critical members of the healthcare team is the registrar. Treatment cannot begin until the patient is registered.” That success was shown in our patient satisfaction scores. We will explore our results and what our patients are saying about this new service.

I hope you join me at my presentation as we not only talk about telehealth services, but also about building relationships between registration and the clinical staff.

Conference Preview: Perfecting Patient Financial Experiences Using Self-Service Patient Portal and Estimates

Session Title: Perfecting Patient Financial Experiences Using Self-Service Patient Portal and Estimates

Presenters: Terri Manifesto, Senior Director of Revenue Cycle at El Camino Hospital

Learning Lab: Pre-Conference Financial Panel

Date/Time: May 3, 2:45 p.m.

About the learning lab

Healthcare has been slow to catch up to modern-day consumer trends of transparent financial experiences. With patient payments now making up a larger portion of their revenue, healthcare providers have to catch up. Fortunately, with the right tools and technology, this process can be just as streamlined and excellent as the care patients receive. Follow El Camino Hospital's journey to becoming an industry leader in price transparency for consumers using data and technology to implement a patient portal that provides personalized estimates for 80+ procedures and empowers patients to make informed healthcare decisions. This initiative has given consumers the ability to obtain their own customized out-of-pocket estimate instantly and on demand 24/7 from any digital or mobile device. 

This session will explain how to implement a self-service, patient-friendly price estimator tool that is tailored to each person’s benefits, for high-volume, non-emergent shoppable services. Learn how to provide staff training and education that ensures the adoption of estimates using a desktop estimator tool, overcomes workflow barriers to ease staff burden of this new process and streamlines the patient estimate process. Set benchmarks to determine ROI and success rates — and learn about best practices for a marketing and communications roll out. 

Health systems that see the correlation between the patient’s payment experience and their organization’s brand will ultimately be the ones to succeed. Personalizing the financial experience for patients gives any healthcare organization a more competitive edge. It also generates consumer loyalty by offering a more enjoyable experience. Healthcare providers often go to extraordinary measures to treat a patient uniquely. Billing-related issues frequently muddle that positive experience. InstaMed’s 2016 “Trends in Healthcare Payments” report estimated that 75 percent of healthcare consumers admit to being confused by their medical bills. The bill is the final piece of the personalization puzzle and is often the final opportunity to make a lasting impression. Confusion around the bill can overshadow an otherwise excellent patient experience and prevent patients from visiting again in the future. Driving transparency and ease early in the billing process creates a better experience overall, and it promotes loyalty to the brand and healthcare provider. These tips can help successfully promote transparency.