Valley Children’s Healthcare

Danielle Barry

The vision of Valley Children’s Revenue Cycle team is to be the nation’s best high-performing, patient-friendly revenue cycle while providing consultation, education and support to our patient families, coworkers, partners and providers as we navigate through a complex healthcare environment.

If you Google “Revenue Cycle Management Healthcare,” you’ll find 6,370,000. A majority of them include technology solutions promising to boost your revenue cycle management by eliminating manual processes and reducing costs and capturing maximum revenue. The number of technology solutions offered in revenue cycle management is overwhelming for revenue cycle and information technology leaders. Despite the ever-growing list of revenue cycle management technology solutions, revenue cycle leaders continue to face challenges in maximizing the benefits of these tools. One of the biggest challenges we face is full integration between the tools.

"Not all issues can be solved with technology and if the technology isn’t implemented thoughtfully, it can create more issues than solutions"

During our selection process for our integrated electronic medical record(EMR), it was important to find one solution… one source of truth that met as many of our revenue cycle needs to reduce the number of third-party products needed and the challenges with product integration. We specifically focused on the integration of our clinical and revenue cycle workflows. This is the area we were challenged with while previously operating on six separate EMRs. Another area of focus was on our third-party product solutions. We wanted to utilize ones that integrated seamlessly with our EMR. When we were making third-party product selections we included our operations leads, they know our work best and what questions to ask the vendors to determine if their solution would be a good fit for us. Another consideration and perspective we considered in this selection process was whether our payers integrate with the technology. If not, we potentially lose the benefit of technology efficiencies.

At Valley Children’s, our patients are at the center of every decision we make and we embrace technology that provides as seamless an experience as possible for them and their families. Patients and families want – and deserve - financially transparent experiences where they understand their eligibility, benefits and out-of-pocket costs up front. They want technology that supports self-scheduling, communication with their providers, setting up payment arrangements and applying for financial assistance.Patients have transformed into savvy healthcare consumers, and it is critical that we provide tools to remain contemporary.It is important to understand your organization’s operations and culture to determine which solutions may be a good fit for you. Not all issues can be solved with technology and if the technology isn’t implemented thoughtfully, it can create more issues than solutions. One of our guiding principles during our recent integrated EMR implementation was: “The best technology still requires our own best human skills.”Strong people and processes continue to be your ost powerful asset in optimizing technology.