Services

"The research provided by the Information Technology Academy has proven to be a valuable resource for our organization. In the course of evaluating new electronic medical record applications, we needed information on four potential vendors. I reached out to The Academy’s research team, and the information they provided on those vendors was very helpful in our selection process."

“As an employer in a rapidly growing industry, Lancaster General Health sees our membership in the Information Technology Academy as an integral part of maintaining a competitive edge in attracting talented professionals from the workforce.

Not only are we able to retrieve extensive, up-to-date data on job descriptions, salary assessments, vendor comparisons, and benchmarking statistics, we can network with other members to get real-time feedback on overcoming similar problems and reaching similar goals.”

“As we move toward an integrated health system environment, we’ve continued to extensively use the information The Academy provides to assist us with achieving the efficiencies this presents and evolving our governance model. The Academy’s research is very relevant and reliable, and helps us to focus on revenue improvement opportunities in the midst of our system conversions. The information we receive is not the typical anecdotal information you often see in the industry, but instead is pertinent research that we’ve used to assist in our implementations and initiatives. Given our expanding health system, my time is at a premium, and The Academy’s research is especially valuable in helping me to stay on top of the latest trends and best practices in the ever-evolving revenue cycle.”

“We are working with The Academy as part of our revenue cycle improvement program, and are partnering to communicate process standardization to our employees and improve upon our already high standards of performance. Just as we aim to standardize care throughout our system, we also seek to standardize revenue cycle education with high quality training that has added benefits. Our directors and managers have embraced The Academy’s courses, which customized with specific content for our staff. The Academy also allows us to be efficient in our training, enabling staff to continue their education with less time away from their job.”

“We have found the Information Technology Academy’s research community to be a valuable resource that we can use to provide direction on IT projects.”

“I wish to provide an enthusiastic endorsement regarding the professional services of Healthcare Business Insights (HBI) and its Information Technology Academy. HBI’s team has provided excellent services during the time our organization has been a member, and has been an invaluable resource for research, background information, and knowledge base support. The HBI membership has been literally the best money for a support resource that I have spent this year, and I highly recommend their services.”

“If I could pick only one source of information for revenue cycle insight, it would be The Academy—I always find their research and analysis to be very valuable. My team enjoys the continuing education offered and the library of resources and tools available. We recently used elements from The Academy’s job descriptions to revise and strengthen our existing ones.

In addition, The Academy’s research on streamlining the authorization process has been a great help, especially as we strive to provide the best possible experience to our organization’s patients.”

“In our day to day, it can be hard to find the time to revise policies, procedures, or job descriptions and create necessary staffing resources. With our partnership with the Information Technology Academy, we are able to evaluate and deploy evidence-based resources from their Implementation Portfolio and I feel that we are a part of a community that is invested in our success.”

“The ability to request specific research at no additional cost is a great benefit of membership with the Information Technology Academy. If we need unbiased analysis of IT vendors, or want forms or policies created to meet the unique needs of our organization, we can be sure The Academy’s Analyst Advisory service will provide a timely response.”

"My requested analyst advisory piece on peer review allowed me to compare our current standards and protocols with industry best-practice, and ultimately provided ideas that will aid in improvements to our process."

“Our membership with The Academy has been very beneficial. My team finds great value in the Analyst Advisory’s customized research. And, in addition to using Academy data to benchmark our revenue cycle performance, we regularly incorporate this data in our quarterly report-outs to our hospital executive team. We have also leveraged their best practice case studies to assist with our strategic planning and to help drive our continuous process improvement efforts.”

“The Academy was able to assist our CEO and me by developing a best-practice governance policy, which was supported by evidence-based best practice and ultimately saved significant FTE from researching and writing up new policies. In addition, we were able to save significant dollars by educating our staff remotely. We don’t even have to reserve rooms! Team members can view virtual conference right from their desk to learn best practices from better performing facilities!”

“In an effort to support a larger project aimed to reduce adverse events, the Academy helped our team benchmark the costs of patient falls and pressure ulcers, and supplemented findings with actionable implementation tools to drive quality improvement. In addition to the value provided, the team was able to deliver on my custom research request in less than one week!”

“Where were you when I was in grad school? These articles are awesome!

Thanks for these, and I look forward to finding more to back up our current efforts!”

“As a healthcare system, EMHS looks for solutions that improve quality and the health of populations, while reducing the per capita cost of health care. Through interviews with industry leaders supported by academic literature, the Academy helped identify strategies to reduce costs of colonoscopies and provided engagement strategies to ensure physician buy-in. Their Analyst Advisory team continues to provide great service to aid our journey into a more value-based care environment.”

“Monthly journals have been high value for our team! Leaders from accreditation, infection control and patient safety bring them to departmental meetings to identify innovative best practices for our health system.”

“I know when I receive publications from the Cost & Quality Academy, I can trust that it’s been well researched, with input from true top performers. On top of that, having that one-on-one time during virtual conferences, and hearing from prominent organizations has been incredibly valuable to my team and me!”

“The Cost & Quality Academy helped us understand innovative strategies towards both palliative care and improving patient satisfaction scores! The Academy’s palliative care material included successful screening tools, governance structures, and appropriate case studies highlighting how to achieve success. The HCAHPS action plan helped give tools and tips to directly improve individual patient satisfaction measures toward value-based purchasing. Together these materials have quickly steered us in the right direction!”

“The Academy’s research is always very interesting & helpful! I really value receiving the monthly newsletters, including Patient Access Monthly. Most recently, I particularly enjoyed an article entitled ‘Initiating Discussions About Financial Assistance in Patient Access’. It’s great to be able to take an article like this around to meetings and show my colleagues documentation of how some peer providers are dealing withvery similar issues & what’s worked for them.”

“Recently, I read The Academy’s Annual Revenue Cycle Thesis from cover to cover. Given our quest to continue identifying and seizing net revenue opportunities, the section on performance improvement & data analytics was particularly helpful. In fact, we used the information as a framework in strategically planning and budgeting for our new team dedicated to Lean and Six Sigma-driven revenue cycle projects.”

“The Academy’s Best Practices in Clinical Documentation and Charge Capture report was instrumental in implementing concurrent reviews at our facility. Upon sharing the research and analysis within the report with our Chief Medical Director, he quickly gave his support for this approach and got our program up and running. In all, membership with The Academy has been a great resource for building consensus and expediting our revenue cycle process improvement efforts.”

“We’ve absolutely found value in our membership to The Academy, and we take full advantage of all the resources it offers. My staff and I routinely attend monthly teleconferences to hear case studies, contact the Analyst Advisory for our research needs, and use the best practice reports for presentations to the board for specific initiatives. I especially enjoyed the best practice report on Next- Generation Financial Counseling, which had a lot of great ideas and tools that we look forward to implementing. 

We participate in other organizations like HFMA, AAHAM, NAHAM, etc., and get great value out of those as well, but membership with The Academy is distinct—the information we receive is operational and can readily be applied to our organization.”

“Whenever our revenue cycle department hires new managers, I set them up with access to The Academy’s web portal. Our team has found such a wealth of valuable resources to support leadership development; when they are able to see case studies showing the strategies and successes of specific peer providers, they become empowered to implement bolder initiatives. There’s real value for our entire organization to be an Academy member and it’s well worth the investment.”

“We use The Academy for a variety of services—among them, customized revenue cycle training content. Their ability to turn revenue cycle subject matter information into courses customized for our staff is second to none. In addition, we are in the midst of an Epic conversion, and The Academy’s E-Learning is a valuable tool to help us identify areas of focus as we bring our staff up to speed. We have a great team of revenue cycle trainers here at Presbyterian, but the expertise of The Academy is a great addition for both process and technology training.”

“The Academy’s materials have been very beneficial in helping us to identify net revenue opportunities, guide initiatives forward, and support our improvement efforts. I recently used everything outlined in The Academy’s white paper on addressing bad debt in the ED to develop our strategy & support the hiring of two new financial counselors—especially as we’ve doubled the size of our ED this year. Their research & analysis has been great in helping make decisions like this & obtaining support within the organization.”

“The Academy’s E-Learning is a new approach to an old problem—it’s a solution that not only sustains the development of our revenue cycle staff, but helps to evolve it and set a new bar for the organization’s revenue cycle intelligence.”

“Membership with The Academy has been great. My team enjoys all of the resources which The Academy provides. We used one particular strategy and its step-by-step approach outlined in an issue of Collecting In Healthcare to develop a process and system with our IT department that enabled us to reduce our GDRO by 5 days in only 6 months following its go-live date—our days are now at 38. So, yes, we’ve found significant value in membership.”

“Every month, for The Academy’s Virtual Conferences, I reserve a room for our entire 20-person CBO revenue cycle management team, and we all gather as a group to participate. This is a great way for us to stay up to date and informed on the practices that have proven to be effective at other providers. For each conference, I track the team’s attendance and share it with our Human Resources department, which in turn rewards those who participate month-to-month with internal continuing education credits. So, ultimately, The Academy conferences provide benefit on a number of levels.”

“We loved the conference and in-depth resources. The Academy provided on “schedgistration,” which assisted greatly in supporting one of our recent projects. One of our sites was doing a great job with scheduling tests, while another had a great financial counseling process. The Academy’s research helped us to marry these two together in order to form a future-state model for our organization.

The detailed case studies we received showed us that we were on the right track, and more importantly enabled us to create efficiencies in our project because we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, but could instead learn from others that have successfully put this model into place. It’s for reasons such as this that I regularly keep tabs on The Academy’s ad-hoc research projects, which provide a great benefit to me and to the entire organization.”

“Our objective is to design and implement effective processes and then remove variability. We utilize the Strategic Management team’s control testing process as a measurement to see how well we’re progressing, and we’re going to be better-off as an organization as a result. Without developing controls and performing encounter-level testing, we would have never discovered these accounts or been able to identify that our vendor was not adhering to our contract.”

“The Academy is one of the best investments we’ve ever made—our staff raves about The Academy’s resources! The upfront collections scripting has been instrumental in nearly doubling monthly collections over just the past few months from $400,000 to $700,000.”

“I am impressed with the quality of The Academy’s E-Learning. The way the content is presented makes the learning fun, and the avatars are a refreshing addition to online learning for HealthEast. The content experts have done an outstanding job of taking a tough topic and making it understandable to front-line staff like myself with limited knowledge of the revenue cycle, without the courses being too simple for those more knowledgeable about the topics. The application is also easy to use, which contributes to the overall satisfaction of taking courses on the topic. I, as an educator, appreciate the high quality of the content development and teaching techniques used. Great job!”

“What The Academy’s resources allow me to do is to accelerate completion of my work tasks—it’s much more motivating to sit down and write policies and procedures when you have a starting point. I don’t have to re-create the wheel. It’s much easier to close existing gaps with the help that membership provides.”

“We’ve had a very positive experience with membership. The virtual conferences have been great—I especially liked last month’s conference focused on financial assistance programs. The in-depth case studies were very informative and helped us build consensus. We were also able to use some of the tools that were shared in the presentation to help launch a few of our own financial assistance campaigns.”

“I have been highly impressed at the quality of presentations The Academy has created per my requests. I cannot thank them enough for the beautiful work in training offerings on insurance follow up and pre-existing conditions under HIPAA (which we put to use immediately).

I’m very happy with this service—including the quick turnaround, depth of content, and expedient delivery. Thank you very, very much.”

“We have found membership with The Academy to be very valuable for our team, especially staff members at the front end of the revenue cycle. What we have really enjoyed about membership is having access to a resource providing relevant information that helps keep these team members on the same page with leadership—recognizing the impact of their actions on the organization and its financial health.

As a revenue cycle leader, the information I receive is always timely and put to use. Last year’s reports on topics like financial assistance, payment variances, and point of service collections were a great collection of benchmarks and best practices in the industry, and proved helpful in building proposals and setting goals at our hospital. I’m looking forward to The Academy’s research this year, focused on utilizing lean methods to optimize processes in each revenue cycle department, the timing of which is perfect.”

“The [control testing] report layout is great because it clearly illustrates save opportunities and tells me exactly what encounters I will want to resolve first. I can use it to go into Epic and immediately work through encounters to collect revenue. We are always looking for ways to bring more money in, so this is awesome!”

“The Academy’s Analyst Advisory research team was so helpful when I reached out to them through the Online Chat feature. I was looking for specific research around Computer-Assisted Coding programs, and I was very impressed with the prompt & valuable response that I received. In a matter of minutes, they guided me to the perfect deliverables that satisfied my inquiry. To top it off, The Academy was so attentive that I soon received a nice follow-up email with other related material. What a wonderful experience—this service works brilliantly!”

“I’ve accessed the Big Picture Course and explored the Learning Space, and I recently showed this to all members of our Revenue Cycle Advisory Council at our most recent quarterly meeting.

It got rave reviews, and we see this as a very valuable resource that we can deploy for educating all of those involved in our revenue cycle.”

“Per our analyst advisory request, the Supply Chain Academy produced an in-depth comparison matrix and whitepaper on both total hip and total knee systems. Upon my review of the documents, I was incredibly pleased to find the research provided not only a general product comparison, but detailed descriptions of device technology, efficacy and recall data, and a complete breakdown of each product. This information was imperative in our value analysis of our current device contracts and provided an excellent comparison of products across manufacturers. We will certainly be utilizing The Academy’s analyst advisory service well into the future.”

“We’ve always found tremendous value in The Academy’s Virtual Conferences, especially a recent one on reducing lost and missed charges. Based on resources from that conference, we worked with IT to create more than 40 rules based edits enabling us to automate some of our charge audit process. This effort yielded $40,000 within its first few months and continues to deliver great results—and everyone, including the Board of Trustees, loves what we’ve done.”

“The webinar was well planned out and the speakers were both very informative. As a Quality Management person, I could relate to the first speaker easily and then hear from a physician’s perspective on ways to promote positive buy-in from other physicians. This will be very helpful when I present SCIP data at the surgeons meetings every other month. I plan to try and incorporate some of the information gained from the webinar in future projects.”

“We partner with The Academy to communicate with and educate our staff on our process flows and important revenue cycle concepts as a means to enhance our high standards of performance. The Academy helps us to standardize how we interact with families regarding their accounts, as we use E-Learning to provide high quality training to support this goal.

The Academy allows our staff to learn substantively with less time away from their jobs, and most importantly, helps staff see how the specific processes of their jobs fit into the overall big picture of the revenue cycle. Our directors, managers, and staff helped to create and have therefore embraced The Academy’s courses.”

“Our membership has given way to many resources, helping us to optimize performance. The depth of the case studies is incredible and the monthly virtual conferences create awareness into hot topics that we may miss otherwise. It has been a pleasure working with The Academy, and we hope to maintain this relationship far into the future.”

“The Cost & Quality Academy provided us with a customized, high-impact presentation used to help build teamwork amongst our nursing team, which allowed us to avoid both reallocating FTEs and hiring consultants to do training.”

"We realize that improvements need to be made within our departments, but this audit process validated to us what our teams need to execute on. Because of the control testing report findings, our leadership team now knows what staff training and education opportunities exist. After reviewing The Academy¹s results, we also recognized additional process improvement opportunities between departments."