First Pst after migration to Cloud in Health care Blog

Experian Health, the healthcare industry leader for automating, integrating and transforming the front and back end revenue cycle management process, is committed to securely managing patient data and other healthcare transactions. To that end, Experian Health today announced that its applications* have earned HITRUST CSF® Certified status for information security to manage risk, improve security posture and meet compliance requirements. HITRUST CSF Certified status demonstrates that Experian Health has met key regulations and industry-defined requirements and is appropriately managing risk. This achievement places Experian Health in an elite group of organizations worldwide that have earned this certification. By including federal and state regulations, standards and frameworks, and incorporating a risk-based approach, the HITRUST CSF helps organizations address these challenges through a comprehensive and flexible framework of prescriptive and scalable security controls. “The HITRUST CSF has become the information protection framework for the health care industry, and the CSF Assurance program is bringing a new level of effectiveness and efficiency to third-party assurance,” said Ken Vander Wal, Chief Compliance Officer, HITRUST. “The HITRUST CSF Certification is now the benchmark that organizations required to safeguard PHI are measured against with regards to information protection.” Please click here to learn more about Experian Health’s industry leading solutions. *The following Experian Health applications have earned Certified status for information security by HITRUST: Eligibility Clearinghouse (NOA, TN and MPV), Claims, Coverage Discovery, Coordination Of Benefits (COB), Clinical Data Clearinghouse, Premium EDI, eCareNext, OneSource, ClaimSource, Patient Self-Service, BatchSource, Care Coordination, Search America, MPV portal (mediconnect.com)  

Not long ago, Excel spreadsheets were cutting-edge technology. Compared to stacks of paper and rows of filing cabinets, they seemed like an efficient, cost-effective way to organize and access data. But times have changed. Now, healthcare leaders are looking at their sea of spreadsheets wanting a simpler solution. According to KaufmanHall's "2018 CFO Outlook" report, 94 percent of the senior financial officers surveyed said that their healthcare organizations supplement their main data systems with spreadsheets. In the same report, more than half of them noted the need for better data visualization and easier report creation. This scenario could not be truer for Cody Torgler, physician revenue integrity coordinator with the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. He realized that using spreadsheets was a waste of time and resources. "It really took our follow-up staff away from what they do well," Torgler said. "It was causing them to touch claims multiple times. Every time you touch a claim [that needs more attention], that's taking money away from a claim that you might be able to get reconciled." How did Torgler's team solve its spreadsheet struggles? They saved time, money, and headaches by implementing a contract management system that monitors payer compliance with contract terms, value claims, and audit remittances based on the latest payment rules and adjudication logic. The hospital's new system provides regular updates to staff on claims and offers visualization and more easily searchable data. Staff members can navigate their database by grouping attributes, filtering, or generating reports. "The sky's really the limit with being able to find these variances, get these variances to the payer, and get them reconciled on time," Torgler said. The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics realized something other providers are coming around to as well: With better systems available, it's time to say sayonara to spreadsheets. Shake off spreadsheets and experience Experian For healthcare organizations that are ready to move past spredsheets, Experian Health offers a series of seamless data management solutions: 1. Claim Scrubber Spreadsheets get messy quickly. They're often maintained by multiple users, with different people entering data according to their own preferences. A less than immaculate spreadsheet might not seem like a big deal — until it comes time to fill out claims forms. That's when problems tend to snowball. Incomplete or inaccurate claims forms lead to undercharges and denials, wasting your team's time and effort. Experian Health's Claim Scrubber ensures every claim is clean. Even better, it's automated. Instead of wading through piles of spreadsheets, your staff can spend more time helping your healthcare customer. 2. Contract Manager and Contract Analysis Excel works in a pinch for records storage, but it's not great at keeping track of all the details of a patient's contract. Small fields with overflowing text can leave out important information and make it tougher for providers to see opportunities for negotiation. Experian Health's Contract Manager and Contract Analysis is like an automated contract lawyer. It helps healthcare organizations validate the accuracy of reimbursements, recover underpayments, negotiate better payment terms, and even evaluate potential lines of business. The bottom line? These tools leverage the best data to provide peak contract performance. Torgler's team at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics uses the Contract Manager to stay on top of the hectic process of claims verification. "With the claim count that we have at the university and the volume that we have, Contract Manager has made the transition from the Excel documents to check expected amounts seamless," Torgler said. "The success of Contract Manager has allowed us to really grow at the university." 3. Patient Estimates Whether they're in for an annual checkup or open-heart surgery, patients like to know how much they're going to pay. But poor estimates are frustrating for everyone involved, and estimates based on a few rows of spreadsheet data are bound to be inaccurate. Only when patients are armed with the right estimates can they make informed decisions about what services they can afford. To provide accurate estimates, Experian Health's Patient Estimates tool relies on robust and continuously updated data. A spreadsheet might be able to hold information about a patient's claims history, contract terms, and insurance benefits, but why bother? Experian Health's tool gathers all that data automatically to issue top-notch estimates without unnecessary hassle. 4. Payer Alerts Once you close Excel, the information on a spreadsheet can't help you; it just sits there. Wouldn't it be nice to receive notifications whenever an insurance provider's payment policies or procedures change? That's why Experian Health's Payer Alerts keeps you current with an enormous range of payers. Information from more than 50,000 webpages run by more than 725 payers continuously feeds into the system, which then issues updates and distributes them via email and an online portal. With Payer Alerts, your organization will never be left out of the loop. The healthcare landscape is complicated and constantly changing. Spreadsheets just can't keep up any longer. Experian Health's data-driven solutions can ensure your organization doesn't get left behind. Schedule a demo with Experian Health today.

Experian Health will be at HFMA ANI again this year–booth 1025–at the Venetian-Palazzo Sands Expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kristen Simmons, Senior Vice President, Strategy, Innovation, Consumer Experience, and Marketing, with Experian Health, chatted with Joe Lavelle of IntrepidNOW to provide her insights on this year’s HFMA ANI conference, consumerism in healthcare and much more! Excerpt below: Experian Health booth activities  "[In our booth this year at HFMA ANI, we want to focus] around peer to peer learning and exchanges, so we are doing less selling and more engaging and more understanding. Understanding folks problems and helping to collectively arrive at solutions. We are doing a lot this year in terms of hands on demos of our solutions. We'll be showing some of our patient engagement products which include, self-service portals and mobile options for getting price estimates for applying for charity care, and setting up payment plans. Likewise, on the revenue cycle management side to automate orders with patient access functionality, contract management claims and collections, all those types of things that we do to improve efficiency and increase reimbursement for our clients. We'll also be showing off some of our identity management capabilities to match, manage, and protect patient identities so we can safe guard medical information and reduce risks for our clients. And on the care management side, our early support and sharing of post acute patient care information to help providers succeed as we all move forward into a value based paradigm." How Experian Health is addressing the need for consumerism in healthcare  "When it comes to consumerism, it's interesting when you're a company that has a lot of data and a lot of capabilities to say, 'Hey what can we do for people?' One of the things we really wanted to look at for our consumer approach, was to say, 'What is it that needs to be done?' We had some great hypotheses coming in and a lot of those were borne out but we actually undertook a big national study to take a look at what consumers biggest pain points were. It has a qualitative and a quantitative component. But, we basically looked at the entire healthcare journey so we weren't just asking them about the administrative and financial aspects of care, but also the clinical aspects. As we walked through the journey and were able to get a lot of quantitative data about all these different aspects of their healthcare journey, what actually turned out to be the most painful for the most people, were all the things around the financial equation. And, so clearly there can be pain in a clinical side, especially if you're unhealthy, you've got something chronic, you've got something terminal. There's all kinds of awful situations there but, really affecting almost everyone is a lot of the pain around the financial aspect of healthcare. So, we were able to look closely at some of those pain points and decide on some of the biggest ones that we wanted to tackle." How Experian Health is helping providers address financial pain points for patients and providers "Some of the big pain points for people is just the fact that you don't know what you're going to owe and as the patient portion of responsibility increases, understanding what you're going to be paying becomes more and more important to a consumer. So, understanding what I owe earlier, being transparent, and then helping me pay, those are some of the areas. And there are others but those are some of the absolute biggest pain points. And as you pointed out with some of our propensity to pay analytics, and some of the other capabilities that we have, we're able to help providers understand the financial situation patients are in much earlier in the process so they can get them to the right kind of funding sources. They can give them peace of mind so that they know what they're paying upfront, which may impact when they choose to go in for a major procedure or how they might want to save up for it or how they might want to access different funding sources." Listen to the full podcast