Adventist eyes physician billing

June 06, 2007 | Fred Bazzoli, Contributing Editor

From the June 2007 print issue

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WINTER PARK, FL – Physician billing often isn’t a concern for hospital systems – unless, of course, they own the physician practices.

With that in mind, Adventist Health System is keenly interested in improving revenue cycle management for its employed physician practices.

The Winter Park, Fla.-based healthcare system intends to deploy an automated solution to more than 250 of its physician practices.

Adventist selected Navicure, an Atlanta-based company that offers a Web-based electronic claims management solution for group practices.

Since signing the contract in September 2006, Adventist has brought about 50 of its physicians to the new system and expects to continue migrating employed physician practices to the Navicure system during the next year, said CIO Brent Snyder.

Navicure’s product interfaces closely with the NextGen practice management product that Adventist is implementing in employed physician practices.

“As we moved to an EMR with an integrated practice management system in our employed physician practices, it became clear that we needed a corporate solution for handling electronic claims,” Snyder said. Adventist was looking for a claims management system that connected to a wide number of payers, integrated with NextGen’s product, and had needed functionality and capabilities, he said.

Practices will be able to track claims in any stage of processing, and they can be addressed if they are rejected or denied. In addition, reporting capabilities enable practice managers to identify departments that trigger errors, thus allowing them to implement process improvement.

The goal is to reduce reworking claims, accelerate cash flow and reduce the loss of revenue.

Adventist brought up three practices on Navicure in the fourth quarter of 2006 and is implementing the system at a number of urgent care centers in the Orlando market that implemented NextGen in the first quarter of this year. Practices with about 80 employed physicians will be using the NextGen practice management system and the Navicure application by this summer.