Healthcare Market Outlook and Banner Health’s Approach to Payer Collaboration and RCM Excellence

Healthcare revenue cycle management is essential to keeping a business up and running, and it’s one beast of a topic. The Healthcare Financial Management Association lists the following components of the patient-centric revenue cycle roadmap: an 1) engaged consumer who has ease of access, improved customer service, and improved quality; an 2) engaged patient with coordination of care, coordinated financial and clinical care, and compliant clinical documentation; and a 3) satisfied customer with appropriate payment, effective and efficient account resolution, and decreased cost to collect. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, because you have to consider all the actual components under each of these such as, claim processing, case management, third-party follow-up, and so much more.

So, how do companies make sure patients and healthcare companies are fully satisfied with all components of the patient-centric revenue cycle when there is so much to think about?

On today’s episode of Healthcare Rethink, host Jonathan Wiik speaks with Brad Tinnermon, VP RCM, Banner Health, to provide context on who Banner Health is and how they are involved in the payer-provider relationship in healthcare.

Wilk and Tinnermon also discussed…

• What Banner Health is, their strategy and philosophy, and how their revenue management ties in
• Why payer-provider collaboration is important
• Advice for healthcare entities to manage their revenue cycles in tighter financial times

Tinnermon explained how Banner Health is trying to bridge the healthcare financial literacy gap, “A few innovative things we’ve done—we have an app that’s called a patient concierge app so when you get your bill, you can fire up this app and it brings an avatar out that walks you through your bill. Literally, it’s standing on top of your bill, and you can touch different parts of the bill and the avatar will talk to you about the bill. We created explainer videos for more of the more complicated parts of revenue cycle and healthcare that give you little 60-minute animated shorts that kind of take a complicated topic and help you understand, ‘What’s a copay, what’s coinsurance, why might your estimate not match the final bill?’ stuff like that.”

Brad Tinnermon has 25 years of healthcare revenue cycle operations, tech, outsourcing, and consulting experience and is Vice President Revenue Cycle and Revenue Integrity at Banner Health. He has worked in Revenue Cycle at Conifer Health Solutions, Optum360, and Eclipsys, which is now Allscripts. Tinnermon attended the University of Tennessee and the UCLA Anderson School of Management.