NYC Health + Hospitals on Friday unveiled a new effort to speed up its reimbursement and revenue processes and make the public health system more efficient.
NYC H+H said it expects it will pull in an additional $142 million in revenue after it implements Epic Systems Corp.'s new revenue-cycle technology across its 11 hospitals and other care sites.
Efficiency and maximizing revenue are common aims in the healthcare industry, which is ever searching to improve its bottom line through the use of technology.
Several large systems, such as Kaiser Permanente and Cleveland Clinic, have similar technologies in place already. For NYC H+H, "the result will be a greatly improved user and patient experience," said NYC Health + Hospitals interim president and CEO Stan Brezenoff in a statement.
This revenue-cycle announcement comes a year after NYC Health + Hospitals — the largest public healthcare system in the country — began rolling out Epic's electronic health record system. The roll-out has been rocky, with one executive resigning over concerns about the system and with delays in implementation, which is supposed to be complete by 2018 — the same year the organization will begin putting in place the new revenue-cycle system, itself slated to be complete by 2020 at a cost of $289 million. Some of that funding, which includes staffing and training, will come from the City of New York, and the rest will come from NYC H+H's operating costs.
Once in place, the two platforms will be integrated so providers can more easily access both clinical and cost information and advance population health efforts. The integration will also simplify billing because orders in the EHR are marked as billable right when they're ordered.
Patients will benefit too, the healthcare system said in a statement, by gaining greater access to care costs and the ability to pay bills online.
