BOTTOM LINE UPFRONT
Healthcare organizations often rely on manual, Excel-based reporting to answer critical revenue cycle questions, even though Epic offers robust native tools to track, trend, and analyze performance directly within the system. By leveraging customizable Watch Lists, dashboards, and tools like SlicerDicer and Reporting Workbench, organizations can surface real-time, actionable insights that improve transparency and accelerate root-cause identification. Building tailored Epic metrics empowers Patient Financial Services leaders to proactively manage accounts receivable, reduce denials, and drive stronger revenue cycle outcomes.
All too often, when ramping up at a new Epic client, consultants find ourselves sifting through Excel-based dashboards to validate data, trends, or issues. Additionally, it is not uncommon for a CFO, Director of Revenue Cycle, or functional Team Lead to approach us with questions around how to track down specific account populations for projects such as a Medicare audit or rebill initiative.
Epic comes with many bells and whistles that allow organizations utilizing the Hospital Billing module to track and trend metrics and identify root cause directly in Epic, eliminating the need for cumbersome Excel reporting and freeing up analytics team’s bandwidth. One area in which we specializs is building custom metrics and reporting directly in Epic to allow the Patient Financial Services leadership team to track and monitor data on an as needed basis. This in turn leads to improved ability to identify and address root cause. In the revenue cycle, we are constantly working to identify and fix problems to help drive performance. Improving transparency and accessibility in Epic allows us to identify and address issues in a faster, more proactive way.
1. Watch list customization
Many organizations may be unaware of the fact that Epic’s Watch List is heavily customizable within Radar Dashboards. It can be used to track vendor inventories, at-risk account populations, and high-opportunity buckets or other client-specific metrics. These metrics can be trended by volume or dollar or grouped and drilled into with a couple of clicks directly in Epic. This way, operations is always utilizing the most current data and not reliant on a weekly e-mail. At PinnacleHCA, we have a suite of 60+ custom metrics that can be built and customized to a client’s environment.