Thursday, August 10, 2006
Using report cards to sustain revenue cycle improvement: we manage what we can measure, and we manage well what we measure well
Five guiding principles can help your organization achieve revenue cycle success:
* Have appropriate job functions and work flow design in place.
* Elevate staff performance through quality and productivity goals.
* Ensure effective technology infrastructure is in place.
* Deploy at all levels a comprehensive management tool set and report card metric (dashboard).
* Sustain a culture of accountability.
Are your revenue cycle processes "state of the dark" or "state of the art"? Stanford University Medical Center fosters a culture of accountability. Its revenue cycle is metric-driven for performance and sustainability. Its report cards and dashboards provide the controls, focus, and acknowledgment for doing things right. Peter Drucker's classic definition of management as "achieving results through others" still rings true.
A successful and sustainable revenue cycle reflects a team of accountable, talented, committed individuals who know how to execute well and are constantly learning and retooling, continually trying to make what is good better. We all work with challenging situations and less than optimal tools as our organizations make difficult choices around discrete resources. With consistent and straightforward use of and adherence to performance-based report cards, an infrastructure and culture can be created and sustained that go beyond any one individual or revenue cycle leader.
Think of the revenue cycle in terms of a team sport, such as basketball. All National Basketball Association teams play well. What separates one team from another besides individual skill mix is how well they execute the fundamentals. All players at this level have great field goal shooting percentages. If, however, they can improve by 1 percent (getting clean bills that pass all edits and "score" a payment the first time), it will make a difference over time. If the team can reduce the number of turnovers (denials) by just 1 percent, over time it can make a difference between a successful franchise (organization) and one that is just in the league. Continually and perhaps routinely executing well on fundamentals and constantly improving marginally differentiates top performers.
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