RCM Now – A Digital Daily Management System for Healthcare

Cognos Analytics Consulting Team, July 12, 2021

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Simpler Consulting & PMsquare Team Up

PMsquare is pleased to partner with Simpler Consulting (IBM Watson Health) in the development of RCM Now, a unique revenue cycle management solution. RCM Now is a technology-based consulting service designed to revamp the revenue cycle process and improve the operational management of functional teams within healthcare. 

Why Now?

Improving payer financial operations and revenue cycle management are vital to the sustainability of hospitals and healthcare organizations. These organizations have already grown accustomed to looming financial challenges: wide-sweeping federal regulations, industry consolidation, and emerging reimbursement models have threatened to destabilize business as usual for years; then COVID-19 happened. And when hospitals ceased all elective surgeries and ramped up emergency staffing measures in response to the pandemic, they found themselves caught in an extreme financial double-bind: cut revenues and increased expenses. Even after many healthcare organizations have begun to resume business as usual – it seems clear that the need to optimize every aspect of revenue cycle management has never been greater.

Track Record

For guidance introducing efficiencies to their existing revenue cycle management strategy, many healthcare leaders have turned to the team at Simpler Consulting. Simpler’s track record working with healthcare organizations to transform their revenue cycle operations and achieve unprecedented results is extensive. Using their proven methodology, Simpler Consulting has helped many organizations achieve unprecedented outcomes: reducing Bad Debt below one percent, decreasing denial write-offs by as much as 75 percent, and reducing staff turnover by more than 40%. Implementing their approach has generated as much as 34x in total return on investment.

Continued Improvement

As part of their own continuous improvement journey, Simpler Consulting identified a key opportunity to add value for the hospitals they partner with. The opportunity presented itself in the form of a problem with data and technology. Despite the success of their process-oriented approach, Simpler Consulting observed how technological limitations often disrupted efficient transformation. In some scenarios, process improvement efforts were slowed down by reliance on manual, time-intensive processes (imagine hallways covered with report printouts, post-it notes, and hand-written updates) to chart each day’s progress.  In other situations, valuable opportunities for collaboration were lost because functional teams lacked a centralized system for identifying and implementing countermeasures. Regardless of how data and technology problems cropped up one thing seemed clear: healthcare organizations needed better access to the right data, in the right format, and at the right time.

PMsquare Infuses Data-Driven Insights

To help infuse data-driven insights with their process, Simpler Consulting enlisted the help of PMsquare to develop a centralized data hub designed to standardize processes and provide clarity around key trends and operational metrics.  With RCM Now, operational dashboards provide real-time data insights to guide day-to-day revenue cycle operations. Now teams can more effectively communicate about the bottlenecks they encounter and how best to resolve them, and team leads can make data-driven decisions about daily management processes and staffing requirements. 

The Reason it Matters

RCM Now represents a unique opportunity for senior healthcare and revenue cycle management leaders in search of strategies to improve their revenue cycle operations. In the past, progress may have been limited or uncertain, but now healthcare organizations can introduce efficiencies across all aspects of revenue cycle management and accelerate business transformation and sustain continuous improvement. In addition to empowering data-driven decision-making, RCM Now is extremely versatile. Hospitals can use RCM Now to improve any team across the revenue cycle management value chain including Registration, Scheduling, Records, Coding, etc., as well as the usual suspects (Accounts Receivable, Billing, Denials.) I invite you to explore RCM Now as a viable option for your revenue cycle management strategy and have an ROI Calculator available to assess the value we can help you achieve.

Next Steps

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