Six Ways Technology Can Help Dialysis Centers Strengthen Their Revenue Cycle

Dialysis providers face many of the same financial and operational pressures that affect other provider organizations, including flat or reduced reimbursements, chronic staffing shortages, and increasingly complex insurance requirements. Dialysis centers, nephrologists, and renal pharmacies also grapple with the impact of a growing shift in dialysis care to the home setting.

End-to-End Automation Can Reduce Denials, Improve Cash Flow

The good news is that despite these challenges, dialysis providers can sustain strong cash flow, reduce costs, and mitigate denials by applying advanced technology to the revenue cycle. Here are six ways technology can help strengthen the dialysis center revenue cycle in the today’s difficult operating environment:

1. Identify undisclosed insurance coverage: Because patients often present as self-pay even though coverage exists, determining their true insurance status can be challenging. Yet failure to identify existing insurance can result in significant write-offs.

That’s why renal providers need technology solutions that can uncover patient coverage information before care is provided. Change Healthcare’s Coverage Insight^TM solution provides an expansive network and search-and-matching capabilities necessary to identify and confirm patient coverages at the outset of care.

The solution uses machine learning algorithms—coupled with access to vast stores of available third-party-data—to develop robust patient profiles, which can then be linked to potential funding sources. Notably, it identifies a variety of indicators, including high probability of disability, income levels and financial status, insurance sources, and other actionable information to help you verify coverage and recover revenue.

We can help identify undisclosed coverage for end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients through Medicare/Medicaid, Disability/SSI, third-party liability, commercial insurance, state and county programs, social programs, and charity.

2. Expedite seamless prior authorizations: Streamlining the prior authorization process is essential to help ensure optimal reimbursement for renal care rendered, particularly with commercial insurance and Medicare. But traditional prior authorization processes are frequently time-consuming and labor-intensive and can delay necessary care.

Our Clearance Authorization software addresses the chronic problem of prior authorizations with automated functionality that can determine if prior authorization is required and on file with the payer. The solution also will automatically check medical necessity requirements at the time of registration and electronically submit requests to integrated payers.

Change Healthcare’s Connected Authorization Services go a step further by deploying pre-authorization experts to handle routine authorizations quickly using intelligent technology while working complex cases by exception to improve authorization efficiency and accuracy.

3. Speed adjudication with electronic attachments: As claims management processes have grown more numerous and complex, providers have struggled to ensure that the correct information is provided to the payer at the appropriate time. The result can be delayed, denied, or rejected claims.

Assurance Attach Assist^TM contributes to faster reimbursement and reductions in denials, organizational expense, and administrative burden by automating the attachments process to meet payers’ increased demands for additional documentation. Attachments are automatically delivered and matched to the appropriate claim, and once the claim is released, claim and attachment status can be easily tracked.

4. Expedite claims workflow for recurring services: Creating claims for ongoing ESRD care requires repeatedly documenting the same details on each claim. Revenue Performance Advisor, an end-to-end medical billing platform, provides automation that allows dialysis staff to save time by quickly replicating unchanged data from prior visits while updating date-of-service and other information to expedite claims processing.

Revenue Performance Advisor also includes eligibility and benefits verification and automated claims scrubbing that flags incomplete or incorrect claims prior to submission, resulting in a first-pass clean claim rate of 98%.

5: Accelerate your Medicare claim cash flow: Medicare is one of the largest payers of dialysis services, so ensuring a problem-free and expedited Medicare claims submission process is essential to strong cash flow.

Our Assurance Medicare Direct Entry^TM solution provides a single system for the real-time submission and processing of Medicare claims. It can help expedite reimbursement, reduce AR days, and speed your Medicare primary claim cash flow by at least one full business day.

Assurance Medicare Direct Entry also checks your Medicare claims for eligibility errors using the CMS eligibility transaction system (HETS). Claims needing attention are flagged and posted in Assurance Reimbursement Management for editing. You can quickly correct errors within the system before transmitting the claim directly to Medicare for validation and payment processing.

6: Optimize patient liability: Making it easy for patients to receive, understand, and pay their portion of the medical bill is key to ensuring a healthy revenue cycle, mitigating the need for collection services, and improving patient goodwill.

With our Patient Billing and Statements solution, Change Healthcare serves as your strategic communications partner, delivering multi-channel, personalized print and digital statements to help expedite patient payment collection.

The solution is designed to provide fast, effective statement and invoice processing, printing, and mailing—cutting your costs and getting you paid sooner. Our advanced statement printing allows you to bypass conventional and time-consuming folding, stuffing, and stamping.

SmartPay^TM consolidates each step of the billing and payment process into one place, enabling you to collect more patient payments, get paid faster, reduce your collection costs, and lower patient write-offs. With multiple payment channels, including online, mobile, telephone and via mail, SmartPay helps expedite patient payments before, during, and after the encounter.

A single, trusted partner

Change Healthcare’s deep knowledge of the renal care landscape and our development of disruptive technologies to overcome traditional revenue cycle barriers can help dialysis centers achieve unprecedented revenue cycle excellence.

And unlike many point solutions that only address a specific revenue cycle issue, Change Healthcare’s technologies are part of a comprehensive approach delivered through a single, trusted vendor. That translates into improved process integration and continuity, as well as simpler overall accountability. If you’d like to learn more about our suite of dialysis revenue cycle management solutions, please call us today.