Determining AI’s Place in Healthcare Financial Management and Improving its Setbacks
The forthcoming HFMA 2023 Annual Conference, set for June 25-28 in Nashville, Tennessee, will bring together various professionals in healthcare financial management to explore challenges and solutions of the industry. The confluence of patient experience, care coordination, and revenue cycle management (RCM) is pivotal to the success of healthcare financial management. This vast network, stretching from patient access and coding to claims, collections, and contract management, forms the circulatory system that sustains our healthcare providers. At the epicenter of these complex processes, lies an escalating demand for innovative solutions. Furthermore, a growing sense of disillusionment surrounds artificial intelligence (AI), which was once seen as the panacea for RCM woes. Despite that there’s a growing interest in the merging of AI with Electronic Health Records (EHR).
In anticipation of the annual conference, David Kemp, host of Marketscale podcast Highway to Health, said he expects the event to particularly explore the areas where AI can be useful in RCM and EHR processing, and if it’s a sustainable option that can prove itself.
Kemp’s thoughts on Healthcare Financial Management
“Hey everybody, it’s David Kemp, host of Highway to Health podcast series. And this is your morning shot of the day. We’ve got HFMA coming up, the Healthcare Financial Management Association. Their annual event is later this month in Nashville, Tennessee. First of all, couldn’t pick a better place, in my opinion. Love Nashville and looking forward to the event. I wanted to give you a preview of the event and a couple of thoughts. You know, revenue cycle, financial management, and healthcare is this intersection of a lot of the things that we talk about throughout the Highway to Health podcast. It’s this intersection of margin and mission, patient experience, care coordination, all the way from patient access to coding, all the way to claims, collections, and contract management. It is the lifeblood, the blood flow of our providers. When I look at the agenda for the event, I’m excited about a couple of things. You’ve got a great mix of speakers, first of all, thought leaders, great mixture of solutions and providers coming together to talk about the important topics.
Here’s what I’m excited to learn about. You know, what I’m most excited about is in healthcare, one solution fits one problem for one provider. When we bring a solution to market, especially in revenue cycle, it has to be flexible because no providers’ challenges are the same. And so I’m looking forward to hearing, and there’s a session dedicated to this, I’m looking forward to hearing how these solutions are providing flexibility, customization for their providers, but delivering at scale for the entire community. And so that’s the first thing. The second thing that I’m really looking forward to is hearing from the providers around AI. It’s a hot topic. We’ve talked about it for a long time, but we’re at that point now where we’re starting to get a little bit of an eye roll when somebody brings up artificial intelligence, especially in a role like revenue cycle, where for a long time, and I’ll steal a term from somebody I used to work with, for a long time, revenue cycle was a body shop. When we had more problems, when we had more challenges, when we had higher volume, we just added bodies to solve the solution. That’s no longer an option. It’s not scalable, it’s not affordable, and you can’t find the people to do it anyway.
So, what is the true application in today’s revenue cycle with artificial intelligence? I’ve seen a few things in the news lately about integrating generative AI to search for the key data points within the EHR quicker, more efficiently, so that we can get these bills coded, created, submitted, collected more quickly. But I want to see from the provider side and the solution side, real world results, and where are we in applying some of this new technology to solve real challenges. Flexibility, AI, those are the two things that I’m looking forward to learning about the most. HFMA in Nashville is going to be a blast. Hope to see you there. Thanks.”
