Three Steps to Combat Staffing Shortages and Improve Revenue
From the registration desk to clinical staff, hospitals across the country are feeling the pinch of staffing shortages. Worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, staffing challenges have reached critical levels, and studies indicate the trend will continue over the next five years.
For forward-thinking hospitals, the most effective way to alleviate staffing challenges is to utilize self-service technology to shift pre-service administrative tasks out of the hands of registrars and into the palms of patients’ hands. Finding a technology partner that consolidates multiple systems by integrating patient access, intake and engagement on one platform lowers costs, improves efficiency and increases revenue.
The Negative Impact of Healthcare Staffing Shortages
As the face of your hospital, patient access is the first impression for patients. Short-staffed registration desks operating with manual, outdated patient access processes are primed for a domino effect of poor outcomes—from sub-par patient satisfaction to strained staff morale and retention, even low revenue capture.
Inadequate staffing in patient registration and check-in produces more errors and leaves patients feeling dissatisfied by long wait times. Negative perceptions about your hospital’s ability to see patients in a timely, organized manner can lead to bad reviews that tarnish your reputation in the community, more cancellations and lower patient volume—all resulting in lost revenue.
Then there’s your current staff, left to pick up the slack, taking on more responsibilities and risking burnout to fill the staffing void. Fast-paced, high stress environments leave staff feeling pressured and overworked, which means more errors, costly rework and ultimately denials. That’s avoidable revenue loss for your hospital.
Three-Step Strategy to Combat Staffing Challenges and Improve Revenue Capture
Follow this three-step strategy to alleviate staffing challenges, improve efficiency and optimize patient experience while increasing net revenue:
Step 1: Integrate Patient Access, Intake and Engagement
Ready or not, COVID-19 fast-tracked many hospitals’ timelines for a digital upgrade. But at what cost?
Hospitals quickly sought bolt-on patient engagement tools to enable digital front doors and virtual waiting rooms with the goal to increase efficiency and improve safety for patients and staff. But now these hospitals find themselves with multiple, disjointed systems that are not only expensive to manage, but lack the registration quality assurance processes that protect their revenue cycles from denials, rework and lost revenue.
Integrating patient access, intake and engagement on one platform is the most effective and resourceful way to improve efficiency, maximize pre-service revenue and create the optimal patient experience while preventing denials, rework and bad debt write-offs.
A house without a solid foundation won’t stand the test of time and neither will your patient experience. AccuReg EngageCare® automates critical patient access functions for quality assurance to create a foundation of accurate data from which to build an intuitive patient experience. Our registration quality assurance solution automatically audits all patient registrations for errors using an intelligent rules engine and sends alerts to registrars with instructions to correct errors before they become denied claims. Intelligent eligibility benefit validation isolates likely denial-causing payment risks based on specific payer rules and historical denial patterns before they occur.
With accuracy as your foundation, you can deliver trusted cost estimates and price quotes that your hospital can stand behind and patients can make payment from. By empowering staff to collect payment up front where the cost is the least to collect, you’re not only increasing pre-service revenue, you’re reducing patient financial anxiety and increasing satisfaction.
And finally, by integrating enhanced engagement tools, you improve communication between staff patients and help you personalize patient visits. Automated appointment reminders are a proven method for increasing patient satisfaction, reducing no-shows and avoiding tangible revenue loss. Tools like bi-directional texting keep you connected with patients throughout their visits and mass communications help keep wellness and your brand top-of-mind well beyond patients’ scheduled appointments.
Step 2: Transition Registrar Tasks to Patients, Collect More Cash
Embracing self-service digital engagement is the key to alleviating staffing challenges. Allowing patients to complete online pre-registrations using digital forms and assessments and eSignatures, and to check-in digitally from virtual waiting rooms or by kiosks removes the burden from your registrar staff while giving patients the intuitive digital experience they want.
Shifting administrative responsibilities to patients now frees your registrars to focus on higher value customer service and pre-service payment collection. And because the integration of patient access, intake and engagement combines accurate price quotes with payment processing at the point of service, you’ll increase cash collections and reduce cost to collect and bad debt write-offs.
Rather than using bolt-on, disparate systems that will cost more in the long run, find a flexible partner that can tailor patient access, intake and engagement technology to meet the unique needs of your hospital and your desired patient experience.
Step 3: Ensure Data Integrity Through Automation
As you put patients in the drivers’ seats of their own healthcare experience and give them the freedom to enter their own personal data, it’s more important than ever to maintain data integrity. Bolt-on digital engagement tools that don’t integrate with patient access lack the protective measures needed to prevent denials and rework.
Rather, EngageCare provides the assurance you need that your revenue cycle is well protected, no matter who is entering the data. At the core of the EngageCare platform is a sophisticated rules engine that is continuously updated and tailored specifically for each customer. It uses automation and artificial intelligence, including robotic process automation (RPA), predictive analytics and machine learning, to identify and prevent issues and errors that cause rework, inefficiency and denials.
EngageCare helps you work smarter, not harder with fewer FTEs. By automating patient access processes for quality assurance and eligibility verification to reduce errors, you enable your staff to submit clean claims—the first time. You’re also auditing and verifying the critical information needed to generate the most accurate out-of-pocket costs estimates and price quotes, which enables patients to be consumers and shop and pay for their healthcare just as they do with major retailers. And offering simple, one-touch payments is a sure-fire way to collect more up-front where it costs the least to collect.
Alleviate Staffing Challenges, Increase Revenue with AccuReg EnageCare
It’s simple. Enabling a consumer experience using integrated access, intake and self-service patient engagement alleviates staffing challenges with the added benefit of improved patient and staff satisfaction and increased revenue.
EngageCare automated and integrated patient access, intake and engagement can relieve the strain of short staff while optimizing patient experience and increasing revenue. Contact our team by completing a contact request form or calling us directly at 866-872-7498 to learn how your hospital can upgrade your patient self-service technology.