From the January/February 2011 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Preventive care/population management
EHR provides the ability to proactively review populations seeking situations where the patient should be called back in for follow-up, where preventive care is warranted, or where there is an emerging risk situation such as a drug recall.
There are more individually creative opportunities to be had subject to specific market and the scope of the physician enterprise. One of my favorite stories is of a large physician enterprise which had moved fairly far along with the EHR. Their market coverage and use of the EHR was such that their chief medical officer was able to look at data each day and see what was happening to the health of his city. It got to the point where he was routinely quoted on the radio with insights such as “the flu has taken hold in the northwest part of town and is moving southeast – it’s not too late to get your flu shot”. While this may be a stretch as a part of revenue cycle management, I have no doubt that it increased revenue.
Taken as a whole, these EHR based revenue management activities can be expected to play an increasing role as health care continues to transition. They require recognition that integrating revenue activities into the clinical process will result in more revenue in the near term, but will also likely prove essential as reimbursement methodologies are rethought. However, they are not “plug-n-play” in terms of implementation. They take the committed involvement of clinical leadership and an ongoing process to identify and refine revenue opportunities. In the long term, they may become the definition of revenue cycle management.
John H. (Hank) Duffy is founder and president of JHD Group, Dallas, Texas. The firm focuses on hospital and physician organization strategic planning, mergers and operations improvement.
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