Cycle Up

Meduit is one of the nation’s leading revenue cycle solutions companies with decades of experience in the RCM arena, serving 850 hospitals and large physician practices in 48 states. Meduit combines a state-of-the-art accounts receivable management model with advanced technologies and an experienced people-focused team that takes a compassionate and supportive approach to working with patients. Meduit significantly improves financial, operational, and clinical performance, ensuring that healthcare organizations can dedicate their resources to providing more quality healthcare services to more patients. For more information, please visit https://www.meduitrcm.com/about

On November 30, 2021, new rulings from the Federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) that govern debt collection activities, including healthcare bad debt, went into effect. Meduit’s internal, cross-departmental team worked closely with legal counsel and industry experts to identify changes and implement them for clients that are using our bad debt services. Those changes are now in place, and Meduit is in compliance with the CFPB requirements. Only bad debt collection activities are affected by the new rulings.

Here is a brief update on compliance news that may be useful to your organization.

Consent for Technology Use:
Given the rising expense in such areas as postage and employee related costs, Meduit has implemented numerous technology-based collection tools that can maximize our efficiency and productivity, but consent is key to implementation. Meduit’s Compliance team is ready to review your current consent language to ensure optimization. If you want to verify that the necessary consent language is present for us to proactively and efficiently utilize these tools on your behalf, please send us your intake forms for review. We will be happy to make recommendations that will strengthen the captured consent for you.

Data and Privacy Legislation Trends:
During 2021, more than 160 consumer privacy-related bills were introduced by at least 38 states, showing the increased focus of lawmakers on data and privacy security concerns. While most of these privacy bills were limited in scope, 23 states introduced a total of 34 comprehensive consumer data privacy bills. Similar to what is laid out in the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), these bills are meant to restrict the use of personal information and provide certain rights to consumers.

There has been a continued increase year over year in the number of introduced data and privacy bills, and as the 2022 legislative sessions begin, we anticipate this trend to continue. We will continue to monitor all new bills to gauge impact on Meduit and our healthcare partners, assess implementation needs and develop strategies to continue ensuring strong data protection for all accounts.

Disclosure: Please note that these are highly regulatory items that may affect the industry. All readers should discuss their specific practices and procedures with their legal counsel to ensure the best internal compliance on all accounts. While we are not attorneys, the included information is not legal advice and should not be construed as such.

Hospitals often struggle with covering the entire back-end of RCM efficiently and cost-effectively. Assigning the work to internal staff can sideline needed resources that could be allocated to patient care. Outsourcing those tasks to more than one vendor can be inefficient and hinder communications.

In order to deliver an efficient, cost-effective strategy that provides superior financial results, Meduit has launched a new solution – MedComplete. MedComplete is a full revenue cycle offering that provides highly trained staff, proven processes and innovative proprietary technology from initial billing through final account resolution, covering all business office functions.

MedComplete Is Customizable

Hospitals and health systems nationwide struggle with staffing shortages due to COVID-19, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Staff shortages are fueled by rising patient demand as well as increasing staff illness.

It is critical that hospitals be able to focus their staff on patient care. Reallocating staff from in-house RCM tasks to patient-facing tasks means that providers may be leaving some portion of unresolved accounts untouched. The longer those accounts go unresolved, the less collectible they become. To solve this problem, the healthcare market has looked to outsourced or global resources to get the work done, but how do you connect to reliable RCM resources domestically or off-shore?

Meduit Can Help

Here is where Meduit can help. Meduit resolves unworked accounts due to hospital staffing shortfalls before they fall into bad debt. Meduit can also call upon its resources in Central America, Mexico, India and the Philippines to resolve accounts in an efficient, cost-effective and timely manner.

Case Study

A midsized regional hospital was under-resourced in their business office due to lack of qualified AR resolution employees available in their local marketplace. A segmentation of their AR revealed that once accounts reached 120+ days, the hospital staff was only working 2% of the accounts each month and collecting 15%, which equated to nearly $300,000 per month in collections.

To resolve these accounts, the hospital’s business office worked them in-house for 120 days and then outsourced to Meduit at day 121. Within the first 30 days of the project start-up, Meduit had worked 53% of the 120+ accounts. The hospital staff historically would have been able to work only 4% of the accounts over the same time period. Within 60 days, 79% of the 53% of accounts worked by Meduit had been resolved. These accounts were either paid, sent to self-pay for the patient portion or written off for a total resolution of 42% of the AR.

Collections increased by five times or nearly $1.5 million per month, with similar result trends projected for the following 60 to 90-day time period post go-live.

Find out more about how Meduit can provide the best cost and quality combination to meet your organization’s staffing needs:

Patient financial responsibility is estimated to represent more than 30% of a hospital’s annual revenues. The rising responsibility of covering more healthcare expenses out-of-pocket is particularly problematic for Medicare beneficiaries, who are often retired and on a fixed income.

As a result, hospitals now claim an estimated more than $3 billion in Medicare bad debt each year (Source: HFMA). This revenue leakage presents a significant opportunity for hospitals. However, collecting on those accounts can be a challenge.

Medicare Bad Debt Solutions

In order to help hospital, health system and physician groups recover these revenues before they are written off to bad debt, Meduit has joined forces with F2 Healthcare – a team of Medicare bad debt recovery specialists.

Founded in 2012, F2 Healthcare provides Medicare bad debt solutions that address missed or lost reimbursements and maximize net recovery. The team provides expert consulting backed by technology-driven analytics and served over 250 hospitals in 25 states prior to joining Meduit.

Meduit’s hospital, health system and physician group clients will now have Medicare bad debt recovery solutions available to them.

For more information, read the press release here:

Greg Rassier has almost 30 years’ experience as a revenue cycle strategist, executive and consultant focusing on the design, implementation and transformation of the healthcare revenue cycle and call center solutions. He joined Meduit in 2019 and is responsible for overseeing the company’s day-to-day operations. He is an expert at creating process efficiency and partnering with Meduit’s customers to provide industry-leading revenue cycle solutions. In his free time, you’ll find Greg hiking, traveling the world, golfing, scuba diving and attending the World Cup every four years.

Q: Can you share a bit about your history and what drew you to Meduit?

A: I’ve been in the Accounts Receivable Management (ARM) industry for nearly 30 years. I had an opportunity to join a large health system that was building out a full end-to-end revenue cycle solution 17 years ago. There, I was able to experience the expanse of the revenue cycle from scheduling all the way through the back-end. After helping build that organization, I went out on my own as an operational consultant to support health systems and revenue cycle management (RCM) organizations. In 2018, I consulted for Meduit to help the organization focus on integration and the shift from a service-enabled to a technology-enabled group, which set the stage for Meduit’s growth. The following year, I was approached to join Meduit as COO with the goal of leading the organization further on the path of innovative technology-enabled solutions that drive the company today.

Q: What are the key issues related to the revenue cycle that you see hospitals, health systems and physician groups facing in 2022?

A: Reimbursement issues, uncompensated care and the complexity of regulatory changes continue to challenge the healthcare industry. Regulatory issues in particular are creating difficulties for maximizing reimbursement. However, COVID-19 has had a unique impact on staffing and retention of quality employees. Hospitals, health systems and physician groups are having to prioritize patient care over everything. Many providers are coming up short when it comes to managing the revenue cycle from pre-service work all the way through insurance billing and self-pay collections.

Q: What strategies should providers focus on to recover financially?

A: Healthcare providers need to create strategies around managing staff everywhere rather than having staff only within a brick-and-mortar environment. Given today’s staffing constraints, I recommend a two-part strategy:

Patient engagement impacts patient financial health and satisfaction as well as the cost of delivering care and the revenue cycle. Patients satisfied with their care are more likely to follow treatment plans than those who are not. Patients failing to adhere to their treatment plans have a higher likelihood of being readmitted due to complications and can end up costing the provider more money or result in delayed payment.

When it comes to patient preferences regarding accessing their accounts and paying their medical bills, 50% of patients like engaging digitally; however, 50% prefer a personal touch, according to internal Meduit research. In addition, about half of those who engage digitally become confused and need help. Non-digital and digital-only solutions are both missing the mark. Comprehensive solutions are the ONLY way to engage patients to drive the revenue cycle and a positive patient financial experience.

A robust patient engagement strategy should include:

• Services provided by a patient-focused team that treats patients with respect
• Digital patient engagement tools that empower patients to access their information and pay medical bills easily and conveniently
• Tech-powered solutions that consistently evaluate and measure patient encounters in order to continually improve the patient financial experience

Meduit’s Game-changing Patient Engagement Solutions and Technologies

Hospital, health system and physician groups partnering with Meduit have an array of digital patient engagement solutions and technologies working for them, including:

• Patient Scheduling, Pre-registration and Pre-authorization – Pre-service customer service
• MedQualifyTM – Patient Medicaid eligibility screening
• Patient Concierge app – Explains every part of the hospital bill to the patient
• Voice Analytics – Analyzes 100% of collections calls to improve revenue cycle processes and translates audio into text for client reporting and team training
• Self-pay Follow-up – Patient collections via mail, phone, email and text
• Patient text-to-pay portal – Helps patients access and pay their bills on their phone
• MedEZPay – Patient financing options that benefit both patient and provider
• MedFPx Scoring – Evaluates patient satisfaction to identify trends and pinpoint root causes of escalation in order to improve, score and benchmark the patient financial experience

Meduit leveraged Patient Engagement solutions to help one health system increase its self-pay collections by $6 million per year.

Learn more about Meduit’s Patient Engagement solutions here:

Meduit’s Net Promoter® Score (NPS) from our client surveys for 2021 has arrived. We are proud to report we’ve achieved a rating of 58, which is an increase of eight points over the prior year. To compare, other companies received these scores:

Are you looking to advance your career in healthcare revenue cycle management? Meduit may be a great fit for you. We are always striving to expand our team in order to provide the best RCM solutions in the industry and ensure the financial health of our clients.

On our Careers page, you can review open positions, get a feel for the Meduit team culture, hear from Meduit teammates, understand more about the company, watch videos, view live social posts and much more.

Watch this short video from Meduit CEO Jeff Nieman to learn more about Meduit’s recruiting efforts and the benefits of working with our team: