Andrew Ray, SVP, Operations Excellence + Innovation, Author at Ensemble Health Partners https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/author/andrew-ray/ Your modern revenue cycle solution Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:06:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://www.ensemblehp.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Logo-Chevron-80x80.png Andrew Ray, SVP, Operations Excellence + Innovation, Author at Ensemble Health Partners https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/author/andrew-ray/ 32 32 How to Prevent Burnout During an Electronic Healthcare Record Implementation https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/epic-services-ehr-implementation-burnout/ Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:36:51 +0000 https://www.ensemblehp.com/?p=12323 There’s no need to go into an EHR implementation unprepared. Having a readiness program in place can help smooth the transition to a new EHR. … Read More

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What you need to know

Converting to a new electronic healthcare record (EHR) can be a monumental task for any healthcare organization. The technical needs are complex, but the work leading up to this change to a new system can also be quite overwhelming. The meetings, the questions received and other unknown elements can lead to an unsettling feeling of not being sure if this is the right path — and each of these factors can lead to burnout for staff involved in an implementation.

The surprising hidden risk of staff burnout

Burnout stems from the pressure that comes with managing multiple priorities and added daily responsibilities. This pressure can build as we try to manage multiple tasks at once, and is caused by our inability to maintain a positive and fulfilling work/life balance. To help prevent exhaustion, it’s critical to find that correct balance.

Burnout can show up in various ways for your staff, including:

  • Overextension: Some staff will become quiet, focusing on the tasks at hand and decreasing their work/life balance by putting in more hours.
  • Distraction: Others may become overly emotional and unable to focus on meeting productivity goals.
  • Avoidance: Still others may become frustrated with the process, not wanting to participate and focusing only on the workflows with which they currently feel comfortable.

Some staff may experience all of these issues, which will eventually impact their performance and job satisfaction. This could lead to them moving on from the organization which, in turn, can have a ripple effect on the performance and satisfaction of other staff. In fact, losing a high-performing staff member due to burnout can lead leading to additional stress and fear throughout the workforce.

Solving for the unique pressures of an EHR implementation

During an EHR transition, the normal pressures leading to burnout can be magnified. Staff are often asked to juggle their daily responsibilities along with the additional work of learning and implementing a new system. Competing priorities often make it difficult for leaders to allocate the time needed to learn the best practices and workflows of the new system.

The long timeframes associated with EHR implementations also mean that the pressures of meeting daily operational needs while managing a new system can drag on for months or years. Stretching staff thin for so long often leads to burnout and increases risk of attrition during a critical time.

Luckily, there’s no need to go into an EHR implementation unprepared. Having a readiness program in place can help support and promote a smooth transition to the new EHR. Readiness plans can help prevent burnout by organizing and prioritizing critical tasks, providing necessary status updates and visibility to all project stakeholders, and ultimately ensuring there is minimal financial and operational disruption during implementation.

Ensuring support for technology + teams

The right partner can support a healthcare organization by working with operational leaders to complete project tasks. If followed, these tasks can help each functional area be successful in their daily activities. Readiness efforts might include the creation of:

  • A legacy record plan: Effectively managing and maintaining the legacy record supports the integrity of the future EHR and prevents compliance issues.
  • Document management plan: It’s critical to assess how a new medical record system will impact scanning and indexing. What will shift for the documentation migration process and for faxing? How should those pieces of the record that may remain on paper be managed?
  • Operational workflows: Identifying key and unique organizational workflows to ensure there is a plan that staff know, in order to continue to be efficient.

A readiness liaison can help build confidence with the new EHR by explaining how the new system will look and operate. The planning that a readiness liaison completes helps support the knowledge depth of the current subject matter experts. The right liaison will support a team by:

  • Validating access + workflows: Reviewing the build prior to going live ensures that expected workflows are in place for a smooth transition.
  • Testing: Helping to validate the build through expert review can identify areas that will hinder a successful go-live and remediate build fixes.
  • Reviewing training plan: Reviewing and providing guidance on training plans helps support the subject matter experts and trainers in communicating best practices.
  • Reviewing dashboard and reporting: During this stage, a liaison will help review productivity and overall revenue cycle health.
  • Putting a post go-live plan in place: Establishing daily go-live meetings to track issues and to share examples with the technical team helps ensure go-live issues are addressed in a timely manner.

Readiness liaisons offer wide-ranging support

A readiness liaison partner can support healthcare teams in a variety of functional areas, from Patient Access to Billing. Their key focus areas — and the support they contribute — might vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on the department’s needs, as illustrated below.

Health Information Management (HIM)

In Health Information Management, for example, a readiness liaison may focus on helping teams return to ideal benchmarks quickly after go-live, such as scanning within 24 hours, coding within 72 hours or achieving auto-coding of diagnostic accounts with an 80% success rate.

Additionally, readiness liaisons paired with HIM teams can support by reviewing:

  • Clinical Documentation Integrity (CDI) process
  • Simple Visit Coding criteria
  • Dashboards and productivity reports

They’ll also work to identify and validate a full and accurate record for coding, release of information and retention, along with optimizing workflows for the Master Patient Index, chart corrections, document capture/scanning and deficiency tracking as well as provider notification.

Patient Access

A readiness liaison partner can support healthcare teams in a variety of functional areas, from Patient Access to Billing. Their key focus areas — and the support they contribute — might vary on a case-by-case basis, depending on the department’s needs, as illustrated below.

Revenue Integrity

In order to support the revenue needs of an organization, readiness liaisons are prepared to review charging methodologies, the reconciliation process, the fee schedule or the markup table. They will help drive revenue by looking for missing charges, late charges and inefficient processes, and by ensuring charges meet compliance. In addition, they can ensure that all policies match new workflows once put into place and can facilitate continued departmental education.

These support partners offer a deep understanding of:

  • Charge interfaces and the systems that help support charging
  • Service lines and specialty department workflows
  • The CDM and supply chain connections, including the life cycle of supplies

Physician Revenue Cycle (PRC)

Readiness liaisons working with physician revenue cycle teams help refine and optimize workflows to uncover missing revenue, bridge gaps between providers and coders, and expedite efficient physician revenue management.

These liaisons can offer patient registration support; assist with prior authorizations, referrals and co-pay collection; help in understanding real-time eligibility (RTE) and ensure chargeable orders.

They also help ensure the longevity of each of these improvements through continued education for PRC staff, including charging and reconciliation workshops, as well as reconciling policies with new and existing workflows.

Billing

A readiness liaison engaged in supporting the Billing department might review and suggest improvements for customer service workflows, or set statement and payment plan parameters.

In addition to these responsibilities, readiness liaisons are trained to assist Billing to:

  • Validate single billing office (SBO) workflows
  • Review cash posting workflows (a cash management practice review)
  • Validate workflows for revenue recovery and underpayments
  • Work queue development and ownership for edits and stop bills
  • Review unbilled management workflows

They also work to review regional or state requirements, credit workflows or unique billing practices for provided services and specialty departments like research and transplant services. A readiness liaison might assess claim requirements, invoices, AR follow-up, denials management and audit and appeal processes.

In summary

Staff burnout is a very real risk during an EHR implementation, but the process isn’t one that an organization needs to undertake alone. Having a readiness program in place prior to implementation and working with an experienced partner that is trained and prepared to offer support during the process can go a long way toward ensuring a smooth transition to a new EHR.

______

Ready to take the guesswork out of your EHR implementation? Ensemble Health Partners’ Epic Readiness Program provides a team of more than 60 Epic-certified subject matter experts to serve as readiness liaisons to bridge the gap between clinical, financial and revenue cycle teams to guide development and set-up of your new system. We focus on building efficiency, creating and validating workflows, and providing hands-on support during go-live.

Our team has supported clients with more than 40 Epic go-lives, helping organizations recover faster than the average Epic client. With experience across more than 75 different instances of Epic, we know the metrics health systems need to track to prevent disruption, and we build the dashboards needed to monitor every step of the process.

Connect with us today to ensure you’re maximizing the power of your new investment and setting your system up for future success.

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]]> How to Resolve Credit Balances + Improve Patient Experience https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/how-to-resolve-patient-credit-balance-in-medical-billing/ Mon, 08 May 2023 11:00:00 +0000 https://www.ensemblehp.com/?p=2292 Automatically resolving self-pay credits on patient credit balances can mitigate risk while increasing revenue collection and efficiency. … Read More

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If your organization uses Epic for its hospital billing revenue cycle but has not explored ways to automatically resolve self-pay credits, you could be missing opportunities to mitigate your financial and legal risk, increase revenue collection and gain efficiency for your staff.

Epic offers two automation tools that transfer credits to other outstanding patient balances and generate refunds if they have none: self-pay credits redistribution and automatic self-pay refund requests. These configurable features would benefit most organizations. For example, a large Midwestern health system reduced its self-pay credit volume by 70% and saved 950 hours of manual work per month by employing these tools.

Why it’s Important to Create a Positive Patient Experience in Billing

Patient satisfaction and a positive patient experience are of the utmost importance, and while much of the experience takes place in person with a physician and medical staff members, complicated billing is enough to sour the entire process. Most patients want hospitals and medical offices to offer price transparency, cost estimates prior to care and feasible payment options, but most find themselves engaging in a back-and-forth with billing departments in an attempt to determine cost breakdowns, itemizations, and more. If patients have a bad experience with medical billing, even after receiving great care during their visit, chances are they will be less apt to return if or when necessary, either choosing another organization or foregoing their care completely. While excellent care is vital, the patient’s financial journey is also extremely important in securing a positive patient experience.

What is a Billing Indicator in Epic?

Epic easily sets up not just a particular physician or office with an electronic health record (EHR), but the entire network of the healthcare community. The billing indicators used by Epic are an important quality characteristic or clinical value. Over time, these indicators are used to measure processes, outcomes, performance and other components of healthcare delivery.

How Should You Handle Patient Overpayments or Credits?

Patient credit balances occur when patients pay more than what they owe after their insurance company has been billed, typically due to providers over-collecting prepayments and copayments or from human error during payment posting.

Patient credits can place your organization at risk in several ways, including: 

    • Misrepresenting your hospital’s financial state. By underestimating outstanding accounts receivable, credits create the illusion that your organization has more cash than it really does.
    • Putting your organization in legal jeopardy. Because regulations stipulate not only that hospitals must refund overpayments, but also that they must do so within a certain timeframe, excess credits risk regulatory noncompliance and leave your organization vulnerable to audits.
    • Causing patient frustration. A credits backlog can delay refunds, leaving customers with a negative impression at the end of their experience with your hospital.
    • Decreasing staff productivity. Struggling to analyze credit balances and work down existing credits can be time-consuming, and instead of collecting cash, your staff must focus on refunding it.

Before Making Any Changes, Understand Existing Credit Volumes  

Before turning on the self-pay credits redistribution and automatic self-pay refund requests features, examine your current patient credit balance accounts. Do you have thousands of small balance credits you’re finding during audits? Are there specific scenarios that take staff extra time to resolve?

Understanding your existing credit volume will help you define which credits you are comfortable automating and which, if any, should remain manual. When you have completed this analysis, share it with your Epic team resources. They will use your input to create logic to select which credits to automatically resolve, to prioritize debit balances for resolution—e.g., oldest balance or highest balance accounts first—and to build work queues to review automated refunds prior to posting (optional). The following sections contain more detail about how your organization can approach this project.

It’s equally important in the analysis of existing self-pay credits to decide what limits you will set. For example, your hospital could decide to set a cap on the dollar amount to automatically refund—some choose $1,000. Your organization could decide not to redistribute credits from active accounts receivable to bad debt if it will be obligated to relinquish a percentage to a collection agency. Document any restrictions you want to set around automation and share that with your Epic team to guide their project.

Next, create a list of any credit resolution scenarios that typically take staff longer to process—5 minutes per account is a potential threshold—and meet with your Epic team to brainstorm ways to streamline them. Does your hospital have thorny credit scenarios that require significant manual review? Are you dealing with a clean-up for a past system configuration issue that led to a credits backlog? Opportunities for improvement will vary by hospital but are worth exploring because any complex workflows you and your Epic team simplify now will increase the volume of credits you can automate later in the healthcare revenue cycle project. If you have complicated scenarios that cannot be simplified, make sure your Epic team knows so they can exclude these types of accounts from the automation. For example, organizations receiving charitable copay assistance payments may want to prevent refunding foundation or grant overpayments to patients.  

Self-Pay Credits Redistribution  

With the self-pay credits redistribution feature, Epic can search for other outstanding balances for patients with credits. If it finds any, Epic can automatically transfer those credits to the other accounts.

When implementing this feature, your organization can set guidelines around the types of accounts it’s comfortable automating. Do you only want to refund small balance credits until you’ve seen how the automation works in production? Let your Epic team know, so they can build rules to restrict automation to the dollar threshold you’ve set.

When patients have multiple outstanding balances, your hospital can drive how Epic prioritizes which ones should receive the credit distribution. Some organizations have policies stating that payments should be transferred to the oldest balances first, while some choose the highest balances. Be sure your staff members are up-to-date on federal regulation compliance related to the reimbursement of Medicare bad debt. Let your Epic team know how your organization wants to prioritize outstanding balances so they can configure Epic to resolve accounts in the right order.

If your hospital combines facility and physician patient billing functions (“single billing office” in Epic terms), you can work with your Epic resource to control whether credits are shared from hospital to professional billing. If you do share across billing systems, you can decide how Epic chooses outstanding accounts for resolution—e.g., hospital balances first, physician balances first or the oldest or highest-dollar account in either billing system.

Automatic Self-Pay Refund Requests 

Epic’s automatic self-pay refund requests feature generates refunds when patients don’t have any other outstanding balances. As with self-pay credits redistribution, your hospital can work with its Epic resource to automate only the scenarios you’re comfortable completing without manual review, such as only refunding credits under a specific dollar threshold, or allowing refunds on personal/family accounts while preventing them on corporate accounts. You can define whether automatic refunds require approval before posting, and if so, how to structure approval tiers. Your organization can also decide how refunds are allocated, e.g., back to the original form of payment or all via check.  

Monitoring Success With Epic

After your organization goes live with self-pay credits redistribution and automatic self-pay refund requests, be sure to monitor your patient credit balances to gauge the success of your project. Most hospitals using Epic have a hospital billing overview dashboard (Epic calls this HB Overview) containing an AR summary with a credit balance – self-pay metric. When you drill down into this metric, you will find trending information to show how your patient credit volume has changed since you turned on automation. To track automated refunds over time, work with your reporting team or use Epic’s self-service reporting tools. Plan to thoroughly review patient credit metrics about a month after turning on these features. If your organization trialed automation with conservative limits, consider whether you’re ready to adjust any of the restrictions you set—e.g., increase your dollar threshold—to expand your automation volume. Work with your Epic team to implement any changes you are ready to make.

Automating patient credit resolution where possible can streamline processes for your hospital, staff, and patients. When your credits are under control, your organization can be confident that your AR is accurate, and you’ve mitigated your audit risk. When your staff is released from working high-volume, routine credits, they can focus on those complex scenarios that require their expertise and in-depth attention. And when patients receive accurate statements and timely refunds, they can avoid the headache of trying to get their money back and end their experience with a positive impression of your hospital.

These materials are for general informational purposes only. These materials do not, and are not intended to, constitute legal or compliance advice, and you should not act or refrain from acting based on any information provided in these materials. Please consult with your own legal counsel or compliance professional regards specific legal or compliance questions you have.

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]]> 3 Common Epic Implementation Mistakes Made by Hospitals https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/three-common-mistakes-hospitals-make-when-implementing-epic/ Tue, 13 Sep 2022 09:45:00 +0000 https://www.ensemblehp.com/?p=2286 Epic implementation can be a difficult process that requires learning new software and changing process. Learn some of the mistakes to avoid. … Read More

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Imagine this scenario: Your go-live date for Epic is fast approaching. Your IT team is ready to flip the switch. From a project standpoint, everything is on schedule and moving along. Then a team member approaches you because they’re confused about the process and unhappy that they didn’t get to provide input.

Project readiness—the checklist of technical tasks leading up to implementing a new piece of technology—is only one aspect of an Epic implementation. Healthcare organizations also should consider their operational readiness and Epic optimization—ensuring their people are ready to interact with the new system. Below are three common ways healthcare organizations ignore operational readiness in their Epic implementation process.

1) Shoehorning Existing Processes Into the System Rather Than Designing New Processes

Healthcare organizations move to Epic because it allows them to break down historical silos and make the transfer of data more seamless. In order to make the system work in the way it was designed, processes should be created around system capabilities and the organization’s ideal future state. Consider this example: Physician orders in your legacy system may be used for clinical documentation purposes only, but in Epic, physician orders drive authorization workflows, inpatient-only notifications, referral-based scheduling, coding and charging workflows and other steps. A move to Epic necessitates looking at how existing processes need to change to work with the new system. The new processes could call for resources to be shifted from one department to another.

2) Equating Training + Education

Training is essential in any new software implementation. Users should know how to log in, advance screens and perform the basic functions of the system necessary for them to do their jobs. But education is something else entirely. Education helps explain why the system is set up the way it is and how each user’s work fits in with the bigger picture. Educating operational leaders and associates on the new system is key to getting the people onboard and supportive of the changes coming their way.

3) Leaving the Decision-making to the Leaders

Epic is designed to help bring down silos in clinical, financial, supply chain and revenue cycle departments, so healthcare organizations should bring together stakeholders early on in the conversion process to ensure everyone is on the same page. A strong cross-functional governance committee of both leaders and end users will help align departments on system terminology and other aspects of Epic implementation. An executive champion who is involved in the process can ensure a smooth change management process.

Epic Conversion + Optimization, Simplified.

With the Ensemble’s Epic optimization team, your organization is able to better pinpoint issues to prioritize improvement and maximize your investment. Our certified professionals have an average of 10+ years of experience as Epic operators so they know the gaps to look for, what optimization solutions to implement, and how to quickly get results. After Epic optimization for one client, the organization saw an 86% decrease in external claim errors. If you are considering Epic conversion or optimization for your healthcare organization, check out our Epic Optimization Guide.

These materials are for general informational purposes only. These materials do not, and are not intended to, constitute legal or compliance advice, and you should not act or refrain from acting based on any information provided in these materials. Please consult with your own legal counsel or compliance professional regards specific legal or compliance questions you have.

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]]> 10 Tips for Managing Your Hospital Billing Watch List https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/10-tips-for-managing-your-hospital-billing-watch-list/ Thu, 18 Aug 2022 17:17:46 +0000 https://www.ensemblehp.com/?p=8543 When optimized, your Epic billing watch list can be a valuable tool for revenue cycle managers. Neglecting it may lead to lost revenue.   … Read More

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During Epic implementations, system assessments and optimization projects, we frequently find the Epic watch list section of the hospital billing overview dashboard is missing accounts, creating an Epic “black hole.”  

This happens when clients set up their Epic system and stop certain accounts from appearing in the workqueue and on the work list, which leads to account neglect and lost revenue.   

When optimized, the watch list can be a valuable tool for revenue cycle managers. Is your hospital billing watch list neglected? 

Here are 10 tips to optimize your Epic watch list:

1. Review and fine-tune your watch list criteria shortly after your initial Epic go-live. 

First, make sure accounts route to workqueues appropriately. Next, add filter rules to prevent false positives from showing up inflating numbers on the watch list. For example, the “Outstanding Ins Not on WQ” check will identify accounts that are not on a workqueue 30 days after a claim was sent. But, if you have certain accounts with an intentionally longer follow-up period, like 45 days, then add a filter rule to prevent these account types from unnecessarily showing up on the watch list too soon. Also make sure you aren’t over filtering and inadvertently excluding accounts.

2. Check your “holding workqueues” to make sure you’re not hiding any problems or neglecting accounts.

If holding queues or filter rules exist solely to stop accounts from routing to the workqueue and showing up on the watch list, they may never be worked by an associate or a vendor – consider eliminating them to avoid this problem. One of our clients had hundreds of accounts in a holding queue that no one was working, which greatly impacted their revenue.

3. Build custom watch list alerts to supplement the standard watch list checks.

For example, add an alert to identify credit balance accounts not on a workqueue – always make sure this alert is actionable by the group using the watch list and there is a workflow in place so the team knows how to process them. We’ve seen many clients with custom alerts to identify accounts nearing timely filing or discharged not billed (DNBs) over a certain dollar threshold, but they never established a process to address the accounts that show up, which led to neglect. These account types can also be addressed via workqueue monitoring and workqueue prioritization.

4. Assign owners to each metric on the watch list to support accountability.

Additionally, review metrics’ trends weekly, but switch to daily reviews when there’s high volume. Ownership should also be documented outside of the system. We typically see our clients assign the billing team to maintain the metric ownership document.

5. Use the watch list to help identify broken or potentially missing workqueues.

The watch list should alert you to issues that are not getting addressed. Build your workqueues to automatically identify and route accounts to the “accounts should be discharged” or “accounts should be billed” sections so associates can proactively identify and correct issues before accounts become neglected. 

6. Reassess the watch list criteria after upgrades.

Occasionally upgrades and associated automatic changes can cause accounts to disqualify for workqueues and show up on the watch list. As Epic has increased the frequency of upgrades, it’s important for both operations and IT teams to work together to ensure that the system’s build, such as the work list criteria, continues to support revenue cycle operations. 

7. Make sure you’re using all sections in the radar dashboard needed to monitor your accounts receivable (AR) to identify potential “black holes.”

We often find clients over-customize their dashboards but fail to add the most updated dashboard sections for AR monitoring. We recommend using the standard Epic-released dashboards as much as possible. Epic has committed to maintaining these dashboards and adding new sections with every release.

8. Find infrequently worked and neglected workqueues.

For those infrequently worked, use the hospital billing workqueue monitoring dashboard. And for neglected workqueues, use the hospital billing workqueue monitoring reporting workbench report, which can be exported to Excel for further analysis.

9. Establish a governance process including your Epic IT and revenue cycle operations teams for system changes impacting your watch list and workqueue structure. 

Our clients achieved a lot of success when they created an operations and IT governance partnership and produced SBARD (situation, background, assessment, recommendation, decision) documents to frame up the business requirements and rationale behind the build request. Additionally, they required signoff from key stakeholders and an oversight committee that helped ensure the requested change was truly necessary.

10. Create accountability and open communications for keeping your watch list clean involving both your Epic IT and revenue cycle operations teams

For example, if operations submits a request to exclude certain accounts from specific workqueues, they need to indicate the workqueue those accounts should be routed to. Likewise, if IT makes changes to exclude accounts from workqueues, they should also make sure those accounts are routed to another workqueue and share that change with operations. We’ve found that establishing this infrastructure up front helps to prevent a “black hole” and account neglect. 

Is your hospital billing watch list neglected? Does your Epic instance need to be optimized to maximize revenue? We can help. We have more than 60 Epic experts with certifications across more than 130 Epic applications ready to help bridge the gap between your clinical, financial and revenue cycle teams. We leverage our experience across several different Epic instances to help take the guesswork out of redesigning and implementing new workflows that maximize your Epic investment.  

Contact an Epic-certified expert today to see how we can help.    

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]]> Epic Elite Operators Guide to Optimization & Conversion https://www.ensemblehp.com/blog/epic-elite-operators-guide-to-optimization-conversion-2/ Mon, 01 Jul 2019 07:00:00 +0000 https://www.ensemblehp.com/2019/07/01/epic-elite-operators-guide-to-optimization-conversion-2/ Does your organization have the bandwidth for an Epic optimization or conversion project? A partnership can help ensure successful outcomes. … Read More

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Are you considering Epic conversion or optimization?

You’re not alone.

In the 2018-2019 U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals rankings, all of the top 20 institutions are using Epic, and over half of recent HFMA Map winners use Epic.

Before you get started! 

You should understand that Epic conversions or optimizations are projects of great magnitude.

Because of the tremendous undertaking involved, it is important to evaluate if your organization has the bandwidth to devote to an optimization or conversion project.

Do you have the necessary staff to devote to optimization? And more importantly – do you have the expertise? 

If the answer to either question is no, you should consider partnering with an organization that has Epic optimization and conversion expertise is vital to ensure a successful project outcome. 

We can help. Because our solutions are born from experience, not theory.

Solutions born from experience, not theory.

Ensemble’s experts have completed over 20 Epic conversions. Our team completed 31 optimization projects in 2018 alone, with an ROI impact of $16M.

What Makes Ensemble Different?

  • We’ve done Epic conversions and we’ve completed optimization projects. We’ve been in your shoes, and we’re always pushing the envelope to find new and better ways.
  • Ensemble’s technical expertise bridges the gap between the technical revenue cycle side and the IT side.
  • Most importantly, because we are operators, we know the potential for disruption in operations when undertaking projects of this magnitude. That’s why we’ve developed a playbook and known practices that have been proven to deliver results
    – quickly – with minimal disruption to your operations.

Our Results

Average back to baseline revenue:

10 Days Ensemble Average24.5 Days Epic Best Known Practices

Average back to baseline weeks of payment variance:

90 Days Ensemble Average203 Days Epic Best Know Practices

Case Study: Epic Conversion – (4 Hospital System in Ohio)

  • Increased net revenue by $41,358,277.73 post Epic go-live through documentation-based charge capture and revenue education $3,326,706.76 reduction in net AR over a 3-month time period through workflow and system efficiencies
  • $5,100,000 net benefit from chargemaster configuration initiatives
  • Cash flow normalization in half the time of Epic average
  • Return to baseline gross revenue within 4 days

Client Testimonials

If you want to make yourself, and your team, look good, engage with Ensemble Health Partners. It’s as simple as that. They’re going to deliver on what they tell you they’re going to deliver on. It’ll be transparent to your patients and there will be no disruption to those that you serve in your communities. We’ve experienced dramatically improved performance in every facility and every capacity that you would expect to see.

John Starcher,
President and CEO,
Mercy Health

Our partnership with Ensemble on our Epic project was absolutely worth the investment. They brought exceptional operational expertise and integrated seamlessly into our organization.

Jim Albin,
CIO,
Thedacare

Ensemble’s Epic optimization team are a great partner to enhance our Epic build and operational workflows. They are thorough and completed the project with minimal to no disruption to operations. Their process and engagement to work collectively to quickly respond to needs allowed us to return back to and exceeding baseline – much quicker than expected!

Kelly Recker,
VP EMR,
Mercy Health

Epic Optimization and Conversion Tips & Tricks!

Go ahead and wave goodbye to legacy systems and custom builds. Throw them away for good.

A surefire way to a negative project outcome is to cling to the legacy systems currently in place, or to try to bolt on custom builds to connect systems in Epic. Instead, embrace the way that data moves through Epic. The system is built to connect your organization and your revenue cycle to maximize revenue and your bottom line. Custom builds and legacy bolt-ons add unnecessary complexity.

Take advantage of your go-live to tune up any issues that may exist between the clinical world and the financial world.

During go-live, you have the opportunity to re-evaluate charge capture and methodology. When the Ensemble team undertakes an optimization project, we stand up revenue capture committees comprised of clinical and financial leaders to safeguard the revenue during a system conversion.

The future is here – embrace change!

Epic does a great job of getting accounts to the right person or the right department. This may necessitate changes and shifts in roles for you and your revenue cycle team. Embrace change – and the complexity and culture shock that comes with it.

Invest in staff education. Buy-in from key leadership members is a great way to ensure your implementation goes smoothly.

Investing in Epic education for your leadership team helps keep these individuals informed and helps the implementation team make informed decisions based on their feedback during the design phase pre- and post go-live.

Ensure rigorous planning for cutover and process changes.

Plan to have a tremendous amount of rigor around your cutover and revenue management processes to ensure consistent revenue capture. After go-live, expect to allocate resources to different areas of the revenue cycle than they were previously
allocated. For example: You will most likely want to have a structured interdepartmental DNFB management procedure and process in place.

ensemble_epiceliteoperatorsguide_0719.pdf

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