As we look into 2023, while thank heavens turning the page on a dismally financial 2022, health care leaders are struggling to plan for the future. Dollars and people are both scarce resources with budgets being completely disrupted over the last couple of years. Major projects, purchases and implementations have been put on hold or delayed indefinitely.

But over the holidays we had a perfect example that the cost of doing nothing can be FAR more costly than making necessary and smart investments in technology. Southwest Airlines' holiday travel crisis was a result of a failure to make investments in their internal technology and as a result, their stock is down, their passengers are FURIOUS, their operations completely melted down, lawsuits are being filed and the White House has even weighed in on the mess. Southwest now estimates the financial impact will be $725-$825 million before taxes.

While the situation facing health care revenue cycle leaders isn’t quite that dire, they’ve been lulled into a sense of complacency that their current operations, analytics, reporting and their current data asset are “good enough.” When now more than ever before, every single dollar counts, there is no option for settling for good enough. Health care organizations spend millions of dollars on their Epic, Cerner, Meditech, etc. instance and want to maximize those investments, rightly so.

The problem with that is those systems were designed to be systems of clinical record. And while they claim to be all things to all people, put simply, they are not. There are configuration inconsistencies and data silos that prevent the longitudinal data asset from serving as the base for analytics that leaders need. Going back to the Southwest challenge, it is like knowing where the plane is but not the pilot. You know about the hospital stay but not all of the patient’s other outpatient office-based services.

Investing in a data and advanced analytics partner that understands the revenue cycle world can be the smartest money that health care organizations spend. An experienced vendor with a proven track record that thinks about revenue cycle optimization with an offense strategy rather than waiting to play defense, can produce millions of dollars in ROI in a time when those dollars are critical.

It is time to put away the “wait and see” approach. The time for action to prevent future revenue cycle meltdowns is now. The cost of doing nothing is just far too expensive.

Interested in learning more? The team at VisiQuate is focusing on how we can help hospitals optimize their revenue cycle management. Visit our Revenue Cycle Playbook for step-by-step plays to help you stay on top of the ever-changing landscape of healthcare revenue cycle, or contact us to schedule a demo.

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