Monday Sessions: Expert-led education and tools focused on the weekly topic. 

Friday Workshops: Ask questions live with an expert and engage in peer-to-peer discussion.

All times listed are Central Time.
Week 1 Session: March 1, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Workshop: March 5, 10:00-11:00 a.m.		 Beyond Prices: Creating a Quality Financial Experience with Transparency
Week 2 Session: March 8, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Workshop: March 12, 10:00-11:00 a.m.		 Price Transparency - A Growth Opportunity in Disguise
Week 3 Workshop: March 15, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Session: March 19, 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Session: March 19, 12:00-12:50 p.m.		 Consumerism Strategy Assessment: Developing a Pathway to Improvement
Week 4 Workshop: March 22, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Session: March 26, 10:00-10:50 a.m.
Session: March 26, 12:00-12:50 p.m.
Session: March 26, 2:00-2:50 p.m.		 Industry Insights Into Denials Management: Tips & Tools for Improving Claims Integrity
Week 5 Workshop: March 29, 12:00-1:15 p.m.
Session: April 1, 12:00-12:50 p.m.
 Leveraging Best Practices to Resolve Medical Debt

Session Descriptions

Week 1: Beyond Prices: Creating a Quality Financial Experience with Transparency

Hear how one organization made major improvements and created a common focus to dismantle silos and improve processes to improve AR days, increase self-pay collections, reduce write-offs and increase cash collections. This was all accomplished while maintaining the organization’s mission of "Keeping Patients First in Everything We Do."

Session: March 1, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m., CT
Workshop: March 5, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m., CT

Speakers

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Week 2: Price Transparency – A Growth Opportunity in Disguise 

The deadline to meet CMS’s hospital price transparency requirement was Jan. 1, 2021. Many hospitals have started the process, but have been delayed due to resource issues and data challenges. Others have completed their machine- readable files but are delaying posting them due to concern of publishing their specific pricing information.

Join IBM Watson Health for a conversation on how to make lemonade from lemons - and turn the hospital price transparency rule into an opportunity for growth. In addition to learning how to gain additional value from your machine-readable file, you’ll learn how combining reimbursement rates with relevant data points can help you build a strategic pricing strategy and construct a model for future contract negotiations.

Session: March 8, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m., CT
Workshop: March 12, 10:00 – 11:00 a.m., CT

Speakers: 

Sponsored by

Week 3: Consumerism Strategy Assessment: Developing a Pathway to Improvement

Workshop: March 15, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m., CT

In a post-COVID world, consumer choice will remain an even higher priority in the healthcare marketplace. As consumers take a more active role in choosing among a growing array of health-related goods and services, the healthcare industry is called upon to offer reliable, accurate and timely information on quality, price, convenience, and experience—on par with other retail experiences. Provider organizations that wish to improve their patient financial experience may draw on HFMA's industry-consensus consumerism best practices.

In this workshop, participants will be introduced to the HFMA Consumerism Maturity Model and complete a comprehensive self-assessment to calculate their maturity model score. From there, you can add your metrics into the online calculator to calculate your Consumerism Maturity Index Score. Participants will learn whether their organization’s consumer maturity level is consumer-centric, emerging, initiating, or undeveloped, which will offer insights into creating a process improvement plan that is tailored to the needs of your organization and patient population.

After this workshop attendees will be able to:

  • Calculate where they fall on the consumerism maturity model continuum.
  • Identify opportunity areas within the consumerism model.
  • Create an action plan for improving organizational performance.
  • Learn from other organizations on how they have leveraged consumerism to their advantage.

Sessions: March 19: 10:00 – 11:00 a.m., CT | 12:00 – 12:50 p.m., CT

Workshop speakers:

Session 1: March 19 | 10:00 - 10:50 a.m., CT

Winning Commercial Revenue and New Patients in 2021

With the increase of HDHP plans across the country, the financial burden continues to mount on the shoulders of consumers. For health systems to thrive financially, they must begin to go "upstream" directly to consumers to win commercial market share while at the same time providing financial solutions to increase access to care for consumers. Get your oar and rafting gear, as we unpack strategies on going upstream to win the battle for consumers to increase commercial revenue:

  • Addressing the immediate opportunity for revenue growth within your own hospital.
  • Evaluating ways to engage employers with financially successful partnerships.
  • De-risking financial responsibility while still capitalizing on the opportunity.
  • Providing a financial solution that creates a "win-win" for both the consumer and health system.
  • How to leverage data to chart your course for winning upstream.

Sponsored by

Session 2: March 19 | 12:00 - 12:50 p.m., CT

Managing the Rise of Self-Pay & Consumerism in the COVID Era

Let's face it—your patients are never happy to receive a hospital bill, especially if they are not covered by health insurance. In a 2020 Guidehouse/HFMA survey of healthcare executives, 68% reported an expected increase in self-pay patients. This anticipated rise in self-pay, coupled with the new price transparency regulations raises the question: How will providers react to a new age of rising patient consumerism? Due to the economics pressures from COVID-19, both patients and providers are facing enormous financial challenges, but patient consumerism continues to rise. Providers without a self-pay strategy may find themselves in a tough spot with their patients. Is there a way for providers to manage self-pay follow-up in a compassionate yet effective manner?  Is it possible for providers to improve the patient experience for self-pay patients?  Hear from Guidehouse experts and a provider co-presenter about what they’re seeing with providers across the country.

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Week 4: Industry Insights Into Denials Management: Tips and Tools for Improving Claims Integrity

Workshop: March 22, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m., CT

Healthcare providers, including hospitals, health systems and physician practices, rely on an effective and efficient revenue cycle to ensure that they receive the full payment due to their organizations from health plans and other third- party payers. Among the many hindrances to these efforts, one issue has emerged over the past several years as an ongoing pain point: claim denials by health plans. The increased number of denials, and the associated loss of revenue, pose stumbling blocks to financial sustainability and increase the provider's cost to collect. Despite many new tools, documented processes, new software and emerging technology, the increased denials drain many provider resources and put pressure on their cost structures.

The overarching goal of this industry insight is to promote administrative simplification, consistency, and transparency, increase automation, improve the patient experience, and enhance yield performance by creating and defining claim resolution standards and metrics for measurement and benchmarking.

The sessions offered during this week will offer tools to:

  • Delineate the scope of the denials management and claims integrity issue.
  • Promote collaboration among providers, clinicians and health plans to work toward solutions.
  • Help reduce the infrastructure required to manage denials and improve claim integrity.

Sessions: March 26: 10:00 – 10:50 a.m., CT | 12:00 – 12:50 p.m., CT | 2:00 – 2:50 p.m., CT

Read HFMA's new Claim Integrity Task Force report

Workshop speaker:

Session 1: March 26 | 10:00 - 10:50 a.m., CT

Attacking Claims Denials Using Data Science

With COVID-19 accelerating claim denial growth, healthcare providers are struggling financially. This trend is expected to continue. Clean claim submission should be a key part of any revenue cycle management improvement strategy – it is one of the first lines of financial defense. Enter data science. Access to the right data can help manage critical elements within the revenue cycle.

In this session you will learn:

  • How data science contributes to revenue cycle optimization.
  • Opportunities to recover cash from denials and improve clean claim rate.
  • The key steps in developing a denial management strategy: Leveraging analytics and data science and front-end solutions/prior auth/etc.

Sponsored by

Session 2: March 26 | 12:00 - 12:50 p.m., CT

Addressing Claim Integrity with Revenue Cycle Automation and AI: A Health Systems Perspective

Providers wrestling with ensuring claims integrity and reducing denials face a war of attrition. Whether due to sheer complexity or finite resources, the "grind" of our current approach isn’t enough. Automation and artificial intelligence hold significant promise, but innovation alone won’t be a panacea. Organizations need both better tools and greater agility to drive the next leap forward in revenue cycle efficiency. Knowing both when and how to adopt revenue cycle automation are critical to long-term success.

Join us as we discuss how one regional health system navigated these questions in their journey to automation.

In this session you will learn:

  • How one organization's journey identified the potential benefits of employing AI and automation in the revenue cycle.
  • To identify areas of revenue cycle operations primed for automation and AI.
  • What's needed to create a long-term strategy for automation that will improve claim interity and reduce denials risks.

Sponsored by

Session 3: March 26 | 2:00 - 2:50 p.m., CT

Best Practices to Ensure Claims Integrity & Reduce Denials

This session will focus on using HFMA's Map Keys and other best practices to identify, manage, and prevent denials and rejections. We will also review denial trends as well as the best ways to workflow claims with denials.

In this session, you will learn:

  • How to determine your denial rate.
  • The importance of benchmarking.
  • How to address common types of denials.
  • Identifying and assigning denials to the root cause owners.
  • Employing tools to manage and mitigate denials.

Sponsored by

Week 5: Leveraging Best Practices to Resolve Medical Debt

Workshop: March 29, 12:00 – 1:15 p.m., CT

In an environment where patients are paying more of their own healthcare expenses, hospital and health system finance leaders want to be confident that they are handling patient financial responsibility both compassionately and efficiently. Resolving patient financial obligations continues to present challenges to both patients and healthcare providers. During these sessions, you’ll review patient education and engagement best practices — both preservice and post service as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) and circumstances dictate — and post-discharge account resolution practices to help resolve these challenges.

We'll review HFMA's revised and updated Medical Debt Resolution Best Practices report, which offers concrete, detailed recommendations encompassing all phases of the medical accounts receivable resolution process. You'll also work through best practices checklists with your peers, and hear from organizations who will offer a glimpse into their processes to enhance collection practices and addresses issues such as:

  • How can pricing transparency initiatives help in the effort to improve collections and communications efforts?
  • How can providers and business affiliates improve collaboration to efficiently resolve accounts in a patient-friendly manner?
  • How should hospitals approach the decision about whether to use extraordinary collection actions?

Workshop speaker:

Session: April 1 | 12:00 - 12:50 p.m., CT

Leveraging Technology & Best Practices to Prevent Medical Debt

This session will focus on using HFMA's Patient Friendly Billing® principles and other consumerism-related best practices to leverage technology to measure, manage, and prevent medical debt. We will review patient financial engagement trends as well as discuss how patient satisfaction relates to collecting patient out of pocket costs.

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