Transforming Revenue Cycle Performance, Together

Singing River is comprised of three main hospitals and then we have fifty five outlying clinics. We are a community owned, not for profit health system, all of the proceeds that we generate go back into our health system to help fulfill our mission, which is to improve health and save lives. We have about seven hundred million dollars in operating revenue and about a little over five percent operating margin currently. Singing River, you know, it’s a staple of the South Mississippi area. Patients really know that they can come here, they feel safe, they feel like they’re at home, they know that they’re always in good hands here at Singing River. I think we’ve seen a lot of increased pressure on our revenue cycle from numerous fronts. We’ve seen a lot of pressure being placed on our workforce. We’re getting a lot more batch denials that create tremendous amount of work on our denials and follow-up staff that we just don’t have the capacity to combat even if we were fully staffed. The thing that has been the most burdensome in the revenue cycle in recent years has been the death by a thousand paper cuts. It is very, very cumbersome to keep up with all the payer regulation changes and all of the ever shifting policy updates and just all of the paperwork involved behind the scenes in healthcare. It’s important for us to figure out innovative approaches, being able to partner with external partners to make sure that we continue to be able to support the organization appropriately. We chose R1 because we’ve honestly had a long standing relationship with them. They’ve done revenue integrity work for us for a long time now and honestly the quality of their work has been outstanding. Certainly R1’s history of providing revenue cycle services in the past has certainly given us confidence that they have the expertise to handle that amount of data and how do we build AI around that data. Working with the R1 engineering team so far has been phenomenal. From day one, they were approachable. Everyone has been extremely knowledgeable in front, middle, back end, revenue cycle functions and workflows. It does feel a lot different than some other vendors in the space because it does feel very collaborative and like it is very much a partnership. They are very much dedicating resources to the partnership and to making operational changes that are going to benefit both their business and ours. Really helping us restructure and understand where opportunity lies within our teams. Our one partnership with us certainly fit the strategies we had around AI and partnerships on efficiency and what we can do different in the future. We are extremely excited to work with R1 on this endeavor. We believe it’s going to bear tremendous fruit for our organization. Think that it will be an exciting thing for staff though because it will take away a lot of the monotony of their day to day and they’ll be able to hopefully find a lot more value in their work. Just a natural fit to be able to partner with the ethics and value that R1 has. I think we’re going to see impacts across the organization.