CASE STUDY
Atlas Healthcare Partners creates capacity within revenue cycle teams and decreases labor costs with MedEvolve Effective Intelligence solutions
How did this ambulatory surgery center management company achieve these numbers with MedEvolve Effective Intelligence?
- 97.5%
Pre-service patient collections
- 97.5%
Net collection rate for closed claims
- 31%
Reduction in labor dependence
- 12%
Cash acceleration
About Atlas Healthcare Partners
Atlas Healthcare Partners has quickly become one of the nation’s fastest growing ambulatory surgery center (ASC) management companies. The organization’s focus on successful integration and execution of its proprietary ASC development strategy spurred growth that landed it on the Fortune 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies in 2022 and 2023. Atlas was formed in 2018 to develop and manage Banner Health’s ASC network in Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. Notably, that network grew from eight to 30 centers in just five years.
In 2022, Atlas formed its second not-for-profit health system partnership with Corewell Health (formerly the Spectrum Health and Beaumont Health systems), now the largest health system in Michigan. Since that time, Corewell has introduced a new orthopedic ASC, three cardiovascular ASCs, two multi-specialty de novo ASCs and a robust acquisition pipeline. In addition, Atlas formed a first-of-a-kind national cardiovascular ASC management company in mid-2022 in partnership with MedAxiom, a highly regarded cardiovascular consulting company owned by the American College of Cardiology.
Overcoming technology limitations and overhauling RCM processes
Our existing EMR and practice management systems did not have analytics capabilities to produce the level of granularity and visibility our team needed to identify top performers and reward performance. We wanted answers to questions such as: “How much work effort does it typically take for staff to resolve a claim?” and “Where are financial clearance strategies falling short on the front-end?”
Reducing cost to collect is top of mind for financial executives in today’s ambulatory surgery settings, where declining reimbursements, growing patient financial responsibility and staff shortages are wreaking havoc on operational margin. ASCs must capitalize on existing staff resources and create greater capacity for effective workflow performance, especially given that labor shortfalls in the majority of healthcare revenue cycle departments are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Yet too often the answer to revenue cycle improvement is to “throw more bodies” at multiplying reimbursement problems.
Following the Covid pandemic, Atlas Health Partners saw patient volumes soar due to pent up demand. At the same time, the opening of nine new centers quickly overwhelmed staff and systems due to labor shortages, the challenges of managing a remote workforce and lack of enterprise workflow automation and analytics. In addition, lack of transparency into the productivity and effectiveness of individual team members made it difficult to identify root problems and hold staff accountable. Finally, breakdowns in financial clearance processes were driving up denial rates.
Atlas revenue cycle leaders sought to get ahead of converging issues by seeking solutions to help optimize revenue cycle processes across its rapidly growing network. Primary objectives included reducing dependence on labor, arming staff with tools to work smarter and increasing the system’s zero-touch rate—a key performance indicator that illustrates the percentage of claims that get paid without any human intervention.
In addition, Atlas revenue cycle leaders needed visibility into daily staff work effort to better identify, incentivize and retain top performers. Unfortunately, without data on how staff members moved through their workday, this strategy was a non-starter.
MedEvolve solutions are a game changer in revenue cycle processes
MedEvolve solutions have been a game changer for our revenue cycle processes. The implementation process went smoothly, and we received uncommon support getting our staff up to speed. Now, we have the workflow automation and advanced analytics tools needed to really understand performance improvement drivers within our revenue cycle teams and processes.”
Atlas identified MedEvolve Effective Intelligence (Ei) Suite, which includes intelligent analytics, insurance workforce automation and financial clearance workforce automation, as the answer to holistically addressing the full scope of revenue cycle processes. The solutions address everything from front-end registration to daily workflow guidance to lay the needed foundation for streamlining workflows and improving zero-touch rates.
On the front-end, Effective Intelligence automates and centralizes pre-registration financial clearance functions, ensuring the claims process begins as accurately as possible. It also equips staff with the information needed to collect co-pays up front. Workflow automation then provides the guidance needed to ensure Atlas staff are not only productive, but also effective, in their work. These tools highlight tasks that have potential to produce the most ROI, rather than having staff waste time on claims need little to no attention.
The Atlas executive team was confident MedEvolve’s Ei solutions would provide the transparency she needed to create greater capacity within their workforce and reduce dependence on offshore labor.
Improved financial outcomes with real-time data insights for decision making
We are thrilled with the outcomes achieved with MedEvolve. Our leaders have tremendous confidence in the partnership. We look forward to expanding our work with the MedEvolve team to derive even greater value from data insights, which is key to our success as a growing business.
The value of the MedEvolve partnership speaks for itself. In less than a year, Atlas has considerably improved its financial performance based on overall cash collections and net collection rate (NCR) percentage. Additionally, Atlas’ ability to increase productivity and the effectiveness of work completed has reduced labor dependence by one-third resulting in significant cost savings.
Richards notes that improved coordination across all teams—including patient access, payments, refunds, medical records, collections, billing and coding—has increased centralized accountability and eliminated role redundancies. The organization has also experienced a boost in morale due to the added efficiencies as indicated by their annual employee engagement survey.
Average improvements across four major payers
- 124%
Increase in zero touch rate
- 68.5%
Decrease in refiled claims
- 48%
Reduction in denials
- 76.5%
Decrease in tasks per claim
Run your revenue cycle with Effective Intelligence
Review and assess your practice’s financial status in 5 min or less and know exact where you are losing money and why. Measure the work effort of every revenue cycle employee, incentivize and retain your top performers, and help employees that need improvement.
You can prevent most common denials, rejections and write-offs during the scheduling and pre-registration process in advance of the appointment. Configure checkpoints and use central task management to quickly clear patients and keep your front office staffing needs at a minimum.
- Medical Coding Automation
Aligning the power of the MedEvolve Coding solutions with your internal resources personalizes and trains the autonomous coding model, increasing the speed that auto-codes are generated. The portal workflow also drives operational efficiency, resulting in repeatable and scalable performance.
As team members log in to the web-based application and record each “touch” of a claim, outcome, and next task, key data points are recorded like who completed the task and when, outcome, task notes, internal / external messages sent, collection success and other data points that feed into our real-time analytics.
Reduce RCM labor dependency with workflow automation, task management, & real-time analytics to increase margin.
Outsource your medical billing to us with over 20 years of revenue cycle experience incorporating Effective Intelligence in house.
Improve patient collection rates with account resolution services: call center, mobile engagement, payment portal & counseling.
Increase productivity and visibility into front & back office processes while keeping your staff focused.
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