All right, thank you everyone for joining us today. We are here to have a webinar session and talk about exploring technology-driven practice visibility and insights and how to better utilize your electronic solutions that you have in practice today. My name is Jenna Hagen. I'm a manager of our application specialist at NextGen Healthcare. By trade, I'm a certified athletic trainer and an orthopedic technician. I started out my career working as a provider in physical therapy. I covered high school sports medicine coverage for many years. I assisted in the orthopedic OR and prior to working for NextGen, I was a manager of an orthopedic organization for many years as well. That experience has let me really see the market shift over the years, but watch the evolution of technology, the needs of providers, of our support staff, and our administration really have the touch points that will help them to better engage efficiencies, unlock that automation that they might be able to have, and drive those streamlined efforts within the organization, really helping to improve those better healthcare outcomes for all. Today's session is to target a few learning objectives specifically. By unlocking that automation, we're going to help to drive by working by exception, which will then give you the reporting visibility. I'm going to hopefully help discover the benefits of seamless integrated solutions, the importance of leveraging your practice management solutions with those streamlined workflows, unlocking that at-hand visibility, so not just taking the raw data, but really driving that out of analytics and visualizations, but then taking it and putting it back into your day-to-day workflow, and taking that data-driven workflow information and effectively utilizing it from a training perspective, but also a day-to-day workflow perspective. While we know that not one size fits all within the workflow, my hope today is that I can drive some food for thought for you, take back to your current workflows, your current solutions, and perform an analysis, and I'm going to talk about a tool towards the end of today's session that can help you utilize as well. When we talk about those integrated solutions or integrated platforms, one of those big components is patient experience. Patient experience is that driving contributor to our revenue stream. What can the patients help to quickly and effectively get us information into our system, allowing the staff to not have to manually consume it, manually print out paperwork, have the patient fill it out, spend 15 plus minutes at the front desk when they're in the office. In turn, let's utilize market research, let's utilize patient experience platforms integrated within solutions so that we can decrease the patient's experience by 11 minutes at the front desk. Let's take advantage of an integrated solution that provides 84 percent of successful touch points of patients completing those workflows even without the need of a tablet or a kiosk in those prepare for an appointment or pre-visit workflows. Again, really helping your organization consume in information and drive those revenue streams of those pre-payment collections such as patient balance and patient co-pays. You hear the industry talk a lot about a digital front door, and it's very true. Those patient experiences are digital touch points. I like to take it a step further because we're really now needing not just a digital front door, we're needing just a digital door in general. Is that a back door, a garage door, a side door? If you think about it, you go over to a friend's house, you might just have that warm, welcoming, you know, unwritten invitation to enter via the garage or the side door. And we really want patients to experience that as well. So what automation in your solutions and what touch points in your solutions that you're using today allow for that? Do you have very customizable and actionable reminders that allow that for them to confirm an appointment, cancel an appointment, message with a staff texting one-on-one, not only just canceling an appointment but be prompted, are you sure you want to cancel? Here's three availabilities that you'd like to get rescheduled. What automation can we put into play via messaging to help that digital door experience for patients to again start to drive those workflows and those revenue streams for your organization? The more data that we're going to talk about today that we can consume into a system electronically, the more visibility and insight that you're going to have to then take it back and continue to fine-tune and streamline those workflows. I've got a few data points in front of you and really those data points come from market answers of solutions that I'm personally experienced with that allow for you to take the data and say, when I looked at, you know, provider productivity and resource utilization of a schedule being full versus what's available, booked versus available spots on a scheduling book. By turning on a smart waitlist in automation, I'm not only requiring my staff to manually review and say, hey, I've got a list of patients that want to be seen sooner, I'm allowing an automated system to take over and say, a cancellation occurred, let's go ahead and reach out to them automatically via the system, say, hey, you wanted to be seen sooner, would you like to see this availability that just occurred? They can confirm yes and the system takes over and puts it on the appointment book. If you think about the resource allocation and the time that allowed for that to happen, it significantly improves the efficiencies and allows your staff, whether it's your centralized scheduling, your centralized business office or your front office staff, manually reviewing versus letting the system take over, that now gives them more time to have that one-on-one patient communication or direct patient care that might be needed within the organization. And this gave the patients a quick and easy access point. Furthermore, you can take the data and you can look at best practices when you turn on systems or when you go back and analyze current systems and say, you know, if you have that current visibility to drill down and see that, you know, you're getting patient populations of 60 years or older, they're actually most commonly replying to their appointment reminders between 8 and noon on Wednesdays. That's very granular data for you to then take back from that visualization and say, we need to fine-tune our reminders. Let's get that first reminder out there on a certain timeframe of the day so that we can hit that checkpoint of a Wednesday between 8 and noon for the majority of our patient population. If the majority of your patient population is 40 or less, statistics are telling us that they're more likely to answer their messaging before 7 a.m. for the day or from 7 to 9 p.m. Now those are early and late hours and hopefully you have a system that allows you to identify, you know, timeframes that you want your patients to be communicated with or your patients to be able to say, I don't want to be communicated in and out of these timeframes, but if you have that open availability to let your system do that, using those data points to say that age demographics 40 or younger, they're busy with work, they're busy with kids getting them to school, their time to prepare for their day is before 7 a.m. or when they're unwinding when the kids are at bed between 7 and 9 p.m. They're going to look through emails, they're going to look through their phone, and they're going to play catch up from the day and complete the messaging, complete those intake workflows, and maybe even pay a patient balance that they got prompted. So again, having that visibility, having that insight, really drilling down in it, really unlocking it and taking it and instilling it in a workflow. Because we turn a system on one way or because we use a workflow today that works doesn't mean that it's the most efficient or the most best practice workflow, and that's something that I can really speak to from experience of, you know, when I obtained the management role in my prior orthopedic organization, I took over the current processes that were in place because I didn't know any different. I didn't know what I didn't know, and over time, as I really dug deep, I, you know, you really look at your system, you really look at the analysis of where am I applying my time and could this be done more efficient. Excel spreadsheets are great, but how can I get that data consumed automatically versus me manually putting it into a spreadsheet? And those are really important factors and food for thoughts that I'm hoping that some of these facts and some of these workflows we talk through today will really drive some efficiencies for you to take back to your organization. When we talk about system automation, there's all kinds of automated intelligence or artificial intelligence out there in the market that is an ever-growing need and ask from industries and specifically within the specialty market, within the orthopedic market. It's a niche market. We've got specialized patient care, and we have specialized patient demographics and populations, whether it's heavy workers' compensation or personal injury, whether it's a mix of your commercial payers with your Medicaid, Medicare, and then your workers' compensation. We need to really be able to fine-tune and hone in on those different workflows because, as you all know or well aware, the payer guidelines, the payer restrictions, and the payer requirements, let alone the patient requirements of those specific demographics, are getting more and more intricate to navigate. So, how can we unlock automated charge entry in a system? How can we evaluate claim scrubbing that we're not having to touch each and every single claim that comes through our system and let it automatically run through rules so that your staff can work by exception? Let the systems that you have or the systems that you're looking for really drive the automation to run through those rules. Your eligibility, running batch eligibility, there are touch points in patient experience platforms to let the patient have some access to eligibility and run it when they're doing pre-check workflow. And there's, of course, touch points where your staff is working with those payers to make sure that we have active eligibility. But what is your practice management solution doing as a batch, as a whole, for your organization in automatically communicating with those payers? And do we take it a step further and utilize a tool that helps you to detect coverage, additional coverage, to where the system can automatically say, this is a self-pay, or this is a patient that has termed insurance. Maybe they're not aware it termed, or maybe they're not aware they have other policies available. Let's utilize a tool that automatically reaches out, pings top 10 region payers, for example, in your area, and says, hey, this patient has active coverage. Here's their policy information. So again, you as an organization can consume that in, bill through the proper payer versus only collecting on a self-pay rate. Those are just some examples. But again, by taking that data, having it within the system, and having it automated within the system gives you more visibility and more touch points within the organization to then report off of and circle it back for that streamlined workflow and the efficiencies. It's reported today through market data and analytics that about 56% of consumers of electronic medical record systems as a whole are not utilizing the full potential of automation, whether that's payment posting, whether that's automated claim pushing and pulling to clearinghouses, whether that's just simple triggering of alerts or preventing certain patients from being scheduled in a scheduler, or automatically assigning a task or a job for your staff to work and have a clean list of what they know they need to do every day when they come into the office. There's a wide array of automation that can be recommended and turned on and performed, and the vast majority is not utilizing its full potential. So, I'm here today to highlight some of those feature functionalities so that we can really kind of dig deep, go back to your current system, take an analysis and say, no, this is a cumbersome workflow. This is a pain point for me. I really want to think about what Jenna had to offer, and she's speaking to concrete examples of claim scrubbing automation and me only having to have staff work a few claims and not all of the claims. My current system can't do that. Let's work with Jenna and see what systems could help us do that. When we talk about visibilities and insights, this is that third tier of, you know, you've got the workflow efficiencies, we've turned on the automation, but now let's take that data, let's make it consumable, let's make it reportable, and let's really talk about the visualizations and the insights and then turn it into those efficiencies for you and your organization. I can speak from experience as well when having, you know, those weekly, every other week, monthly meetings with providers, physician owners within the organization, you're taking the raw data, running a report is extremely meaningful. Being able to trust the data is extremely meaningful. The ability and the advantage of having a single integrated solution allows you to have that single reportable database, and that's super important to have your what I call single source of truth data points. And so when you utilize an integrated solution, when you utilize those single source data points, you get that clear and concise raw data. But when you can take that data and have it automatically extracted into visualizations and KPIs and benchmarks and indicators, it gives you more of that food for thought. It gives you more of a difference than that standard financial reporting. And by contrast, it gives you that filtered or processed data that you can interpret more readily because it's visually presentable, it's colored, it's by pie chart or strip spark lines, and it shows you that trending and forecasting over time. It makes it much more consumable and much more meaningful. So being able to have it on a tablet and prop over to a provider meeting and say, look, here's your productivity, here's your resource utilization or your build amounts for December, we know that those are the crazy months, and here's your payment correlating as they trickle in from January because of your December efforts. And so again, having those early warning signs, being able to quantify your goals because of these benchmarks and indicators, but not just having that quick visualization, being able to drill down and take a closer look into the solution is also just as meaningful and important. What I'm going to do is pull up a solution here today and just walk you through some examples of how I have been able to look at KPIs, look at indicators and make it more consumable and meaningful and just highlight a few training opportunities that could be presentable based on some of the data. When you look at different KPIs or indicators that can be available within the market, there's a few here that I have within my workflow that I'm going to call out specifically. When you talk about bill lag, the ability to measure bill lag of how quickly are your providers getting charges in this system, how quickly are we getting documentation completed, because really that helps to streamline the efficiencies of getting them out the door, right? The quicker we bill, the quicker we get it out the door, the quicker we can get paid from a payer. And so, yes, I can see that my organization might be averaging 7 1⁄2 days or 7.3 days, and I'm measuring outside of those trending benchmarks of what would be industry standard or even regional standards. I can then take down the visibility, I could trend it over time, but I can actually drill down further and look at what providers tend to hold up those benchmarks or those indicators. So Dr. Zanoni might be new to the organization. Now, in a demo world, you can see here we're holding on to charges a lot longer than hopefully you are in a live environment, but Dr. Zanoni might be newer to the organization. He might be ramping up, he might still be working on efficiencies, or maybe he's not new to the organization, but we just have had a trending over time inefficient process of getting our charges into the system quickly and efficiently. And so this gives me visualization to say Dr. Zanoni needs training to quickly get the documentation into play. Maybe there's payer guidelines, or maybe there's CPT coding guidelines that are holding them up because they're trying to navigate it a little bit differently. And so there's different visualizations that you should be able to drill down within your different indicators. But you can see here that once we get those billing charges into the system, and then we start to drill down into how quickly we're getting them out the door, that industry standard is two to three days. You get your charges, get them out the door within two to three days. Now, that probably feels pretty slow. Most organizations are more around the one to two day, I would say. But don't worry. Within most KPIs and systems, you should be able to reset your benchmarks and your indicators that's most meaningful to your organization. You can see here that in my demo world of a solution, I'm trending green. We're doing very well at letting the system take over automation and take those charges once we get them, scrub them, clean them, and get them out the door to our clearinghouse very quickly and effectively. And then having that quick visibility of what's our unbilled charges on the table. We as an organization might have a benchmark of what's appropriate for us to hold on to. And so we can set that benchmark. And now I have that visual. I'm still within the green. We're still within our normal flow. We're still within our normal process of those unbilled charges sitting on the table to still get out the door. But as soon as it clicks red, I've got that early indicator, that early sign to see what's holding up those charges. Why did it grow? What changed? What provider maybe held it up? Or what payer or CPT code maybe held it up before we can get it out the door? When you talk about breaking down those workflows and those efficiencies, having that visualization of what your payer mix looks like, you might have majority of a certain patient demographic, whether you see majority workers compensation, but you still might have a payer mix, a small commercial payer mix, for example. So really having that visibility in that high level kind of bird's eye view of your payer mix is super important. This allows you to see I've got majority of Medicare. They're going to take most of my time, most of my focus. And so if I then learn that Medicare is holding up some of my tasking or my staff's jobs, I know that that's where I need to apply my efficiencies and my automation and unlock some of those rules and workflows in my solutions, because I now know that Medicare is going to be the bulk of my revenue stream based on my demo world example here. I'm going to continue to surf through this, but just to call out a few of really having that visibility of your billed amount, your charge amount, your payment amount, your collections amount, your adjustments amount, or your refunds. But also what's the quantity, how many encounters or the productivity of what was seen in a data service trending over time, even maybe drilled down to a provider. Within the charts and KPIs, having the ability to drill down, and of course, you could potentially shortcut and filter down to specific filters here. But if you just wanted to really get that visualization and say, why did the total encounters with charges drop for the month of October or for the month of July, for example, here? What was the driving force of that? Was it a specific location or was it a specific provider? And so we can really watch it trend over time based on your locations, your departments, your specialties, and even some of them pulling in by specific CPT codes or specific services. When you look at payment lag, this is a key one that I used to rely on heavily of how quickly are payments getting in the door? Where do I need to really hone in on those efficiencies? And so more specifically by payer or by financial class, for example. And so depending on your organization's architecture and how you trickle down some of the breakdown of your setups, my demo world's pretty accurate of workers' compensation taking a little bit longer to get us payment compared to some of those commercial payers. This is that great visualization that instead of looking at an aging AR report of the raw data exported to Excel, while that is meaningful and that is your raw data from your source of truth, taking it, putting it in here, populating it right on my top of my list with that red indicator of, look, they're the slowest payer. This allows me to say, you know what? My system allows for automation. I'm going to go back and I'm going to turn on a rule that says when a bill went out the door for workers' compensation and it acknowledges that payment hasn't come back in for, let's say, 30 days, it's going to automatically trigger a task and it's assigned to Gemma so that when it hits that 31st day of that encounter or that claim going out the door, no payments come in, I'm going to have it on my dashboard on that 31st day to follow up with that payer, make sure they've received it, make sure they're not still waiting on medical records, make sure they're not waiting on any additional information that they need to get that claim processed and get that money in the door quickly and efficiently. Utilizing that data, utilizing that visibility and making it a streamlined, automation-efficient workflow within my practice management solution natively. A couple other here that I'm going to call out just specifically to give you a little bit more food for thought, but denial management, denial recovery, the big hitter, the big time sucker of resource allocation within organizations because as mentioned earlier, you know, navigating those payer guidelines and those payer requirements is very cumbersome and tedious. So what can we use in systems to unlock the visibility, whether you're utilizing tools within a clearinghouse or directly within a practice management solution? Personally, having the visibility to say, not only did we get a denial, but what was the denial reason for and how well did we as an organization go back and recoup after that denial? And did we void it or write it off and why? Those reason codes, that methodology is really important to have insight to, because why would we continue to build on a code if it historically trending over time, continues to deny, we're continuing to writing it off, continuing to void it, and we're not able to collect on those efforts. A system can be smart enough to take an encounter and say, here's the denial reason code. Here's that cart code that came in or work code that came in. It automatically triggered a task. The staff is identified or notified to say, here's your reason code for coordination of benefits. Now we're going to work it. It's going to watch that claim number, that encounter number and say, did we collect off of it? Did we collect that money? Ideally, over time in the live environment, you've got much more green trending over time as your staff, your organization is recouping on those denial efforts. But again, having that visibility to really drill down to the reason of those denials or specific codes of those denials and say, why are we still billing in global bundle period? Why are we getting denials for eligibility when we've got eligibility automated and in a batch fashion? What payer is still failing and who's assigned to those tasks and those jobs for us to continue to work specifically? Or what CPT code specific to eligibility within a patient is failing so that we can begin to stop billing certain CPT codes or guide more productive billing efforts because of these insights and access points that we have here. Having the ability to customize and configure those insights and those visibility checkpoints for you as an organization is also really important. So not only just saying as an organization, I've got denials for this amount of value or dollar value or percentage of optimization, but maybe a specific provider, maybe we want to watch or trend over a provider over a certain period of time within their specific billing practices and rights so that we can see how many were billed versus how much did we collect and were we writing off and watching those trends over time so that we can work with that specific provider because maybe they're new to the organization or maybe we're catching those early signs of those payer changes or contract changes and guidelines and visibility. As I continue to go down here, I kind of want to circle back to that first slide that I mentioned of the more operational visibility and insight. So the patient experience, for example, I would consider those a little bit more operational visibility versus financial visibility. From operational visibility standpoint, it's really important to understand, are we productively billing for a new patient because they're truly new? They've either been never seen in our organization or they've not been seen within three years. Are our providers capitalizing on that new E&M code versus a established or follow up E&M code appropriately? Or with copay collections, the systems are smart enough out there to know what we should be collecting and did your staff actually collect it? And having visibility into not only what should be collected and what was actually collected, but who collected it and who could be better? This would be an example of do I unlock auto flow within a pre-check process where a patient arrives to the office, your staff's checking them in, turn on automation that prompts them through a series of events that automatically forces them to a screen to collect a copay, to check eligibility again, to have a patient sign a form so that they can't forget those important steps because we know the front desk gets busy and congested from a check in and check out experience. So this is the ability for me to say that this employee was expected to collect a large sum of money in the month of July. They did not collect a fraction of that. And so we need to go turn on auto flow for this specific user and make sure that they're not skipping these important steps as a built in training module, built in automation, but also comfort and security for you as an organization that your staff will be prompted through important steps to collect those revenue driving checkpoints here. And then visibility into what those responsibilities are for your staff and organization. It's very easy to say, hey, we're going to run a cancellation list every Friday and my staff's going to manually work down it. We're going to call the patients and get them rescheduled. But where's the accountability in that? Because the data is coming that these amount of cancellations occurred and we have a list to say that we ran it at this time and who's working the report, but we don't have the ability without utilizing a system of automation and visibility to say who's working that specific cancellation and what is the status of it and when is it due by the ability to report off of it, taking it a step further and allowing a task or a job to automatically trigger within systems to say, hey, cancellation occurred, trigger a task to whoever's normally assigned to work it. So they're notified of cancellations or again, utilizing a patient experience platform that will help the patient not just cancel an appointment, but reschedule so that you as an organization don't even have to have a job or a task assigned or run a list manually. You're consuming in that data electronically, you're consuming in those workflows automatically and you're allowing for those those forces to be unlocked. A couple of quick things that I just want to circle back to and call out with the last few minutes of time that we have here today, when you talk about a practice management solution and you talk about automation and driving the efficiencies, you really want to make sure that when you're making your reports and your custom configuring them and you're looking at your contract analysis of what your reimbursable amounts are or you're running patient cost estimation that's built in and integrated into your solution and what were your collection efforts off of that? Having those reports not only accessible and, of course, exporting to those visualizations that we just spoke to, but allowing an automation tool to be turned on to automatically run those reports, automatically send them to an email for you at a scheduled time so that you're not spending that two, three, five minutes of time to go to a folder, find the report and run it. The system's running it for you. That's two, three, five minutes of efficiency back into your workflow that you can then take the data, have that report in front of you, but then again, utilize the visualizations in front of you. So what I have in front of you is just an example of an automation tool that could be used to automatically run eligibility, scrub your claim edits, assemble your claim forms, get in the clearinghouse so that, again, your staff can simply work by exception. And in the last minute here, what I'll end on is just letting you know that in the resources provided within this webinar, you're going to be provided with a resource or a tool that's an Excel spreadsheet to take back to your organization and do an analysis, run through and score yourself on your workflows and your efficiencies. What can we improve? What can we streamline and use this? Keep it updated so that you can quickly and easily highlight, you know what, scheduling automation is not something that we're utilizing today. And I scored it a one. What can I utilize? What can I turn on and partner with your solutions or look at additional solutions that can really help you to drive those efficiencies today? I appreciate your time. I hope that some of this was helpful for you. And I look forward to hearing from you if you have any additional questions. All right. So thank you, everyone, for attending. Does anyone have any questions? All right. I'm not seeing any come through. So as a reminder, we do upload these to our Learning Center, so you'll have access to the entire recorded Webinar after the fact. And all of the resources are going to be shared within the email follow up that will have that link that Jenna referred to. So thank you so much to Jenna for hosting this webinar and thank you for attending. We look forward to seeing everyone again soon.

webinar session

Jenna Hagen

technology-driven practice visibility

electronic solutions

healthcare practices

automation

practice management solutions