Bringing RCM tech priorities and benefits into focus with Fazie Harney and Sofia Garcia
One of Nordis Technologies’ largest and longest-term clients is TeamHealth, an amazing company with the stated purpose of perfecting physicians’ ability to practice medicine. With approximately 20,000 affiliated physicians and advanced practice clinicians, TeamHealth offers outsourced emergency medicine, hospital medicine, critical care, anesthesiology, orthopedic hospitalist, acute care surgery, obstetrics and gynecology hospitalist, ambulatory care, post-acute care and medical call center solutions to approximately 3,300 acute and post-acute facilities and physician groups nationwide.
Our relationship rests with TeamHealth’s revenue cycle management division, which provides billing and revenue cycle management services for its provider clients. We spoke with two technology leaders for its Healthcare Financial Services unit: Fazie Harney, Vice President of Applications, and Sofia Garcia, Director of IDX/GE Centricity Support.
How do you use technology to grow your business?
We are always looking for technology tools to support greater efficiency and productivity in our RCM services. Automation leads to efficiency and reduces production costs.
What are you focused on now?
We’re not implementing any new applications right now. Instead, we are working on adding volume through our existing apps. For example, we have an October go-live in which we will shift additional statement volume into Expresso, making it easier to add new clients and new business.
How has communications technology impacted your provider clients?
It promotes better revenue cycle collections; it gets money in the door faster. It’s about speed and efficiency. As for Expresso, it works, so we don’t worry about it. It’s so stable, we’ve had no issues.
What would surprise people about TeamHealth?
The volume of business that we do. We produce and distribute 17 million patient documents—mostly statements and credit letters—and will soon reach 20 million a year, all processed through Expresso.
What’s your favorite Expresso feature?
We get a lot of client requests for special messages for patients, such as explaining that we’ve contacted your insurer but they will not pay for that treatment for various reasons. Before Expresso, inserting this variable messaging was quite painful—it was manual and time-consuming. With Expresso, we can easily tailor notifications for specific patients, so the ease of adding exceptions improves our customer service and operations while supporting our provider clients.