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May 20, 2009: Leading acute hospital increases cash collection by 100% |
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St. James Hospital is an acute academic teaching hospital in Dublin, Ireland. The hospital has over 900 beds, a staff of approximately 3,700, and had almost 400,000 patient episodes in 2008. Download the full case study here >>
According to Brian Fitzgerald, Director of Finance, St. James Hospital: ‘We knew we had a problem because of high claim denial rates, and the length of time it was taking to receive payment. This had significant impacts on the hospitals cash flow’.
Brian and his team set-up a programme improvement and revenue-cycle redesign that found that each claim paid submission was taking on
average more than 100 days to receive payment. There was also significant risk with written off debt.
In 2007, the team started a pilot project with Slainte Technologies to look at an electronic solution that would address each of the key problem areas, and ideally eliminate them.
Slainte Technologies focused their efforts on standardising the claims process in a progressive manner using their flagship product, Claimsure. Claimsure is fully integrated into the St. James’s Hospital Patient Administration IT system, enabling a seamless link between patient registration and claim generation and subsequently to an electronic submission model.
Results for St James have been outstanding. Cash collection has increased by 100%: the hospital has doubled what they would normally collect. Staff resources to manage the complete hospital claims processing environment are 50% of the levels required to operate an efficient paper based process. Debtor days have also dropped by 50%.
One side benefit of having the information stored electronically also meant that the hospital can return to an individual claim easily, resulting in a significant saving in time. St. James’s now believe that the Claimsure platform will allow them even more efficiencies in the claims collection process, delivering further savings and improved cash collection. |
