Project Background
One of the largest acute care and behavioral health hospital networks in the United States has more than 300 locations. This organization was experiencing costly delays in credentialing and dissatisfaction from physicians working at their hospitals because it was using an outdated credentialing platform to meet new demands on its Medical Staffing Services group. The hospital network’s corporate and hospital leadership decided to take a measured approach in finding a solution and enlisted Acorn to compete for the business.
The pilot project was designed to evaluate Acorn against the incumbent credentialing platform at a hospital located in Southeastern Florida, where they have more than 1,000 practitioners in a 233-bed facility. The objective was to evaluate the impact of moving their Medical Staffing Services to an advanced automated solution that would decrease the amount of time needed to get practitioners credentialed. This major health system had hundreds of payer groups and they were looking for a solution to evolve the credentialing, privileging, and enrollment processes as they moved to a delegated network designation with new reporting requirements and strict audit requirements.
Client Problem
The hospital network’s current credentialing software was not equipped to handle their workflows and prevented them from reaching their business goals. There was significant provider dissatisfaction because the process took too long and required frustratingly repetitive data entry to complete the application, which in turn led to clinician retention issues. Primary source verifications often required two or three attempts to illicit responses, costing valuable time. This laborious and tedious process resulted in delays in patient care and severe losses in revenue. Difficulties with committee processes and in-person file reviews led to additional interventions at executive levels. Ultimately, the issues compounded to millions of non-recoverable dollars being wasted by the organization.
There was significant provider dissatisfaction because the process took too long and required frustratingly repetitive data entry to complete the application, which in turn led to clinician retention issues.
Acorn Solution
Our client instituted Acorn’s credentialing software at its test-site hospital and rapidly improved the productivity of the Medical Staff Office. Acorn’s automated platform significantly decreased the turn-around time of primary source verification, and the use of a fully online application process increased the satisfaction of the Medical Staff.
Acorn’s automation transformed several paper-based processes into simplified digital data capture processes, which increased efficiency by 69% in the first few months. It is expected that once the Acorn solution is fully integrated into the hospital’s system, the overall efficiency rate increase will be 83% or better.
Acorn’s automation transformed a number of paper-based processes into simplified digital data capture processes, which increased efficiency by 69% in the first few months.
Benefits: Provider Satisfaction
Our client reports that provider satisfaction increased significantly with the Acorn credentialing solution. Using Acorn’s Medical Passport, a central repository for data and career-related documents, each practitioner can control their own information in the system. Using a mobile phone to scan and upload documents, as well as the ability to complete and submit their applications online with an intuitive tool, made it easier and faster than a paper process. Practitioners also touted Acorn’s other additional benefits such as the ability to have their group managers manage the process for them, CAQH import/export capabilities, and automatic email alerts regarding upcoming expiring credentials as being key in further streamlining the data maintenance process.
Benefits: C-Suite Oversight
Progress of provider applications and key critical information is easily communicated to C-Suite hospital administrators with Acorn’s graphic dashboard and Big Data analysis tools. The ability to schedule reports to be auto-emailed to the C-suite expedited the communication process for our client.
Benefits: Increased Revenue
The highly automated Acorn solution implemented at our client’s hospital location has integrated fragmented workflows, streamlined the credentialing process, and increased satisfaction of the credentialing staff, providers, and executives. This has resulted in time and money savings through efficiency but also through an accelerated onboarding process for providers that enables them to generate revenue without delay. The expansion of this initiative across the client’s entire hospital network will increase the organization’s revenue exponentially as well exceed the investment in moving to a highly automated Medical Staff credentialing process.
What’s Next
The client is now expanding this initiative to their behavioral health hospitals that are still using manual processes to credential their practitioners. This initiative has an even larger goal to produce an 89% increase in productivity, driving increases in revenue due to timely credentialing. They are projected to increase enrollment with payers by 20% to 30%. By reducing physician enrollment time by 10%, the estimated increase in revenue is approximately 2% to 4% across the organization.
