In the 1930s, Ovaltine offered listeners of the Little Orphan Annie radio program a membership badge with a decoder ring that allowed listeners to replace numbers with letters and figure out secret messages – which usually urged them to drink Ovaltine..
Fast forward to 2015, and a decoder ring can be bought online for under $20. Unfortunately, these trinkets aren’t sophisticated enough to help practices and hospitals decipher reimbursement contracts and identify underpayments.
Providers today require robust analytics and automated workflows, coupled with a level of support that goes far beyond an instruction manual to include continual updates to contract terms by skilled contract analysts.
According to the American Hospital Association, combined Medicare and Medicaid underpayments were $51 billion in 2013. Private payers further contribute to underpayments, totaling a hefty financial gap for providers, regardless of care setting. It is imperative that providers across hospitals and medical groups take proactive measures to ensure they are paid fully and fairly for the care and services delivered. Incorporating automated solutions enables providers to fully decode the hidden “catches” in contracts while recovering underpayments.
Understand how proposed contracts with payers affect your revenues
When a payer assures you that proposed contract changes will benefit your organization, are you skeptical? Using contract analysis and modeling, you can accurately predict how a change in any of the hundreds of variables in third-party contracts will affect reimbursement for your precise mix of services.
Not only can contract analysis let you see the overall impact of an individual contract, it also lets you precisely model revenues so you can see the gains or losses for each individual specialty, provider or service. By assessing which factors have the greatest impact on your reimbursement, you can refine your bargaining strategy to negotiate better-performing contracts.
Verify the accuracy of payment received from third-party payers
Ensuring your contracts are as advantageous as possible is just half the battle; you still have to confirm that payments follow the guidelines of the contract. Complicating this process is the move to new reimbursement structures that bundle payments or base them on value rather than services.
Verifying payment accuracy can easily bog down your team–unless you put the benefits of automation to work for you. Contract management and analysis solutions streamline workflow by auditing claims so you spend time only on those that require intervention. Through data-driven insight, you can conduct contract-based appeals and recover lost revenue.
Together, these solutions assist in reviewing and modeling contracts, and then accurately identifying, appealing and recovering underpayments. With the ability to value the claims you file and evaluate overall contract performance, you decode the information locked away in data. All without a decoder ring.
Don’t miss our upcoming webinar, “Overcoming the Three Ps: Payers Who Pay Poorly”
Featured Speakers:
- Kristen Prenger, Director of Managed Care, Lake Regional Health System
- Rebecca Charo, Product Director, Experian Health
Date: Thursday, May 21, 2015
Time: 11 a.m. PT/1 p.m. CT/2 p.m. ET
