I asked an HIM director about her focus at the start of each day. Her answer: Revenue cycle and people.
This week, in the run-up to the AHIMA Convention in Orlando, I’ll be posting one article a week about HIM directors. In my last post, I introduced Diann Brown, an HIM Director and a member of the AHIMA board of directors. She offered a terrific overview of the responsibilities an HIM director has. As far as her day-to-day responsibilities, she starts by focusing on two things: revenue cycle and people.
As a leader, she knows that when she’s visible to her employees, it makes a difference in their morale. She spends about 20 minutes a day walking her department, talking to coders and clinical documentation specialists and HIS specialists, being personable and talking about work-related issues. “It’s very informal,” Diann said. “But when I don’t do it, (my employees) miss it.”
Her revenue cycle focus may come as a surprise for some marketers. I have personally spoken with HIM directors who say that revenue cycle doesn’t concern them. But as for Diann, who doesn’t even report to the CFO (she reports to a vice president of medical and information management), revenue cycle is top of mind.
“We’re a 700-bed hospital, and our HIM goal is to have our unbilled accounts at $2.5 million. Actually, we have been able to maintain below $1 million on a regular basis and have been below $600,000 ,” Diann said. “It takes a lot of coordinated effort to make that happen.”
It seems to me that it’s her determination to meet her goals that makes the difference.
“When I didn’t focus on it every day, it was like being on a roller coaster,” Diann said. “It was up and down every week. And we never knew if we would hit our goal every week. I would think we would and then we wouldn’t, but now that I look at it every single day, Monday through Friday, we always hit our goal.”
Diann looks at high level reports every morning, which categorize her “unbilled accounts,” or Discharged Not Final Billed (DNFB), into inpatient, outpatient, emergency, Medicare and non-Medicare. She looks at the aging of the accounts, and if there are any cases in those areas that age over seven days, they get flagged and are followed-up on. She looks for issues that her department manages that may be keeping the hospital from delivering claims: physician queries that aren’t being answered, cases that have been returned from billing for HIM review, accounts that have data integrity issues, and the like.
In tomorrow’s post, we’ll discuss the biggest challenges facing HIM.
