Access managers absent from HFMA convention
Access managers absent from HFMA convention
By Jack Duffy, FHFMA
Director
Patient Financial Services
ScrippsHealth, San Diego
(Editor’s note: Jack Duffy, consulting editor of Hospital Access Management, recently attended the Health Care Financial Management Association’s Annual National Institute. In this month’s guest column, he reflects on the proceedings.)
I have just completed a quick review of the list of conference attendees. I read 1,000 names before I came to one whose title reflected responsibility for admitting. I never did find an "access manager" listed. This could lead one to believe:
A. Access managers have better places to spend their educational dollars.
B. Chief financial officers keep all the really fun seminars to themselves.
C. The real value of access management as a profession has yet to be recognized by the average health care organization.
There is both good news and bad news associated with this type of conference. First, the good news: The amount of available tools and software to make our jobs as access managers more successful continues to grow. Each generation of technology allows for more heads-up time with the patient and less heads-down time in data entry.
In addition, many vendors are investing heavily in point-of-service technology, and this opens up many access management possibilities. Two of the technologies that are ready for implementation are optical storage of key records and the "smart card" identification system. Both products have advanced through several generations and have matured to the point where they can support our functions.
The bad news is that the emphasis is still concentrated on back-end or consulting relationships. The evolution to point-of-service is taking much longer than it should. Access managers must work twice as hard as other professionals to both perform their daily duties and provide the leadership required to advance the process.
The real problem may be that the consultants, software and hardware vendors, and educational activities at the conference offered vary-ing perspectives on health care access but the true experts access managers were not in attendance.
Wanted: Access managers
A tour of the exhibit hall revealed row after row of consulting services designed to "clean up" accounts: collect the co-pay, calculate the correct payments, and do a myriad other activities that a professional access manager does every day for his or her employer. In the hardware line, leading edge technologies were demonstrated, including voice response, call centers, and optical stored records.
What was missing was a strong access management presence. This seems to demonstrate that the industry fails to understand the potential in true point-of-service tools. To change this, important trade and professional events such as this one must be attended by dozens, if not hundreds, of access management representatives. If you would like me to explain the value of these contacts to your boss, call me at (619) 678-7400.
Coping with compliance
Another major theme of the conference was how to cope with the increasing risks associated with compliance. Once again the message was out of balance due to the emphasis and interest of the attendees on back office processing. Yet, as we all know well, the defense to increased government scrutiny is an educated, motivated access representative.
Our future will be focused on population management of members. The era of episodic registration of strangers is rapidly drawing to an end. The challenge for access managers will be to influence your organization to include the access department as a key specifier of tools and systems. Chief financial officers must change the concept of team leadership to defer to access management the principle responsi- bility for designing the next generation of systems.
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