Intermountain Health Touts 3 Tips for Rev Cycle Collaboration

Strong CDI and physician collaboration directly contributes to the overall health of an organization's revenue cycle.

With the growth of automation, data availability, and tracking, it is increasingly important for the middle revenue cycle to become a priority for healthcare organizations, and department collaboration is the key to success.

That's why Kearstin Jorgenson, operations director of physician advisor services, and Dr. Kory Anderson, medical director of physician advisor services, CDI, and quality, at Intermountain Healthcare worked to streamline their middle revenue cycle by bringing their physician and CDI teams together.

Here are three tips they have for other revenue cycle leaders looking to improve team collaboration.

Center key performance indicators (KPI) on quality metrics

Dr. Anderson and Jorgenson have talked to numerous facilities around the country, and they see many aligning under a finance focus. Finance can be the loudest message sometimes, but what needs to resound is quality, they said.

Intermountain Healthcare focused on quality metrics that were directly impacted by clinical documentation, physician engagement, and education.

"We used to struggle to get an audience," Dr. Anderson said. "Now people are coming to us to talk about strategies and what they could do to improve those metrics."

Bring teams together in a way that still enables them to do their best work

For Intermountain Healthcare, the CDI nurses continue to focus on trends and identify what the team needs to learn. They collaborate with the physicians, and then the physicians go out and build relationships, look for common and shared understanding, and deliver educational presentations.

Bring education work in-house when possible

Intermountain Healthcare used to contract education out to vendors. Now the team does in-house training whenever possible.

Dr. Anderson and Jorgenson say they're getting better engagement with providers because educational sessions are happening between colleagues.

The person leading the session and those who attend see and work with each other in the hospital every day. This allows for more natural accountability and continuous improvements and adjustments because conversations can happen on the job and in the moment, they said.

Follow-through is also greater with in-house education. Intermountain Healthcare has set up quarterly meetings to connect on what’s going well, what isn’t going well, and how to close the gaps.