How Revenue Cycle Technology Can Rescue EMS Payments

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Let’s face it: When your job is to extract persons from dangerous situations that quite often leave them either too impaired or too traumatized to engage in something so trivial as offering insurance information, most of your work in terms of vetting financial viability and insurance coverage is going to have to happen after treatment — no matter how expensive — is already given.

Read this Health Data Management article about how one EMS organization in Reno, Nevada — Regional Emergency Management System Authority (REMSA) — paved a successful path to stronger patient collections and revenue recognition using an integrated, best-of-breed IT approach.

According to Chris Watanabe, Vice President of Business Services and HIPAA Officer at REMSA, “The sharp rise in self-pay patients cycling through the healthcare system presents a plethora of revenue cycle challenges for all healthcare providers—especially EMS.”

Though EMS presents its own unique challenges, it has much in common with mainstream hospital revenue cycle processes and by partnering with technology savvy vendors, can have a positive impact on the bottom line:

• Capture accurate patient demographics sooner in the revenue cycle
• Discover more billable insurance coverage to reduce collection costs.
• Eliminate printing of patient statements and invoices and provide a variety of payment options including credit card and even check payments