News

TAMPA, Fla. – November 15, 2024 – NeuroEM Therapeutics^® was honored last night as one of 30 companies recognized by the Tampa Bay Inno Awards for sparking change in the Tampa Bay community. The clinical-stage biotechnology research company, which is focused on delivering radio wave-based technologies to treat Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases without drugs, was honored in the Healthtech category.

Through its awards program, Tampa Bay Inno aims to showcase the startups and entrepreneurs elevating the Tampa Bay region as a leading innovation hub, celebrating those who are working above and beyond to set the ecosystem ablaze.

Wellesley, MA — November 14, 2024 — External audit volume more than doubled in 2024 over 2023—including higher rates of pre-payment audits—and total at-risk dollars increased fivefold to $11.2 million per MDaudit customer, impacting healthcare provider organizations’ cash flow and exposing them to higher potential denial rates. Additionally, improvements in revenues and operating margins throughout 2024 were tempered by higher denial rates, including an increase in coding-related denials of more than 125% and in medical necessity-related denials of 75% for outpatient claims and 140% for inpatient claims. These trends highlight the pressing need to overhaul revenue cycle management (RCM) strategies in the coming year.

Niagara Falls, N.Y. – October 24, 2024 – Harris Data Integrity Solutions, the leading provider of best-in-class patient data integrity services and software, announced today the promotion of Rachel Podczervinski, MS, RHIA, to Senior Vice President. In her new role, Podczervinski oversees Harris Data Integrity Solutions’ mission to ensure accurate patient identity management through innovative services and software solutions.

Wellesley, MA — October 22, 2024 — MDaudit, an award-winning cloud-based continuous risk monitoring platform for RCM that enables the nation’s premier healthcare organizations to minimize billing risks and maximize revenues, announced today that its MDaudit billing compliance and revenue integrity platform is a finalist in the 2024 Fierce Healthcare Innovation Awards.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – October 23, 2024 – AGS Health, a leading provider of tech-enabled revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions and a strategic growth partner to healthcare providers across the U.S., has received a UiPath AI25 Award for the company’s innovative use of automation and AI to support greater accuracy and efficiency in the intake and management of faxed documents.

Despite efforts to eliminate faxing, use of this cumbersome, inefficient, and costly technology by healthcare organizations remains prolific. Over 9 billion fax pages are exchanged annually at a cost of $125 billion, significantly straining already limited resources.

Revenue integrity has become harder to maintain as audits grow in volume and complexity. Payers are increasing scrutiny and regulatory agencies are reinforcing fraud mitigation. Navigating this evolving terrain requires a reimagined, automated approach to billing compliance, coding, and HIM, optimizing accuracy and efficiency to protect revenue.

We sat down with Dana Finnegan, Director of Market Strategy with MDaudit, to discuss what’s behind the scenes of reimagining revenue integrity and the role automation can play in achieving success.

What's Trending NOW is the intersection of artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, and professional services in medical coding. Host Shahid Shah is joined by with Conrad Coopersmith, General Manager, AGS Health, a company focused on revenue cycle management in healthcare. Conrad shares insights of the use of technology and AI in the coding automation journey.

Healthcare NOW Radio»

Various forms of automation have long been present within healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM). However, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have brought the industry to a significant inflection point, where the use cases for AI tools are expanding as rapidly as their capabilities.

We sat down with Thomas Thatapudi, chief information officer of AGS Health, to discuss the current and future state of AI in RCM and what healthcare organizations need to know about effectively integrating it into workflows.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – September xx, 2024 – AGS Health, a leading provider of tech-enabled revenue cycle management (RCM) solutions and a strategic growth partner to healthcare providers across the U.S., announced today it has been Certified™ by Great Place To Work^® in the U.S. Rankings in the annual program are determined based on surveys of current employees, 85% of whom ranked AGS Health, which was also Certified in India and the Philippines, as a “great place to work.”

Great Place To Work is the global authority on workplace culture, employee experience, and the leadership behaviors proven to deliver market-leading revenue, employee retention and increased innovation. When surveyed as part of the certification process, AGS Health’s U.S.-based employees ranked it 28 percentage points higher than the average U.S. company (57%).

There are a lot of components to consider and talk about in regards to interoperability and data sharing. The inventive ideas and possibilities of where it can go and what it could do, the rules and regulations surrounding this area of healthcare, the privacy and concerns, etc. Today we are going to focus on the innovative technologies and standards that are currently being employed to make our dreams of a better system of interoperability and data sharing a reality.

We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today Community to ask, what innovative technologies and standards are being employed to enhance interoperability and data sharing, and how are these advancements influencing the accessibility and quality of healthcare services? The following are their answers.

A crucial aspect of health care is data integrity—ensuring that health information is high quality, accurate, and complete. Not only does this information affect the immediate care patients receive, but it also can influence their future health care. Additionally, high-quality data can be integral in implementing positive public-health efforts and reducing health care costs.

For The Record»

Among the many weaknesses laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic was the lamentable state of web accessibility. According to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility (BOIA), 90% of US adults said the internet was “essential” during the pandemic. However, more than 97% of homepages tested by BOIA in 2021 had identifiable issues preventing them from conforming with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international standard for digital accessibility.

This accessibility disconnect puts people with disabilities at a significant disadvantage; unable to schedule vaccines, communicate with their providers, or schedule appointments. Correcting this is one reason why web accessibility—declared a human right by the United Nations in 2016—has been elevated to a high-priority social determinant of health (SDOH).

While having different choices and options is an important part of life, some levels of standardization are easier, if not necessary. For example, we all have a favorite gas station based on where we live and what our price and snack preferences are, this is an area where having different choices is great. However, no matter what gas station you visit, all gas pumps have the same standard gas options with standardized octane levels, this standardization makes our lives so much easier and is crucial to having our cars work. In healthcare, being able to pick and choose which vendors, third parties, and technologies to use in our organization is very important. This freedom of choice allows us to customize our organizations to better serve our patients and staff. However, all of these different systems make it difficult to securely and reliably exchange data. Creating a standard for data exchange would make our lives significantly easier, but creating that standard isn’t going to be easy. Exchanging data isn’t something that we can merely measure out and agree on set parameters as we can for octane levels in gas. There are a lot of factors in play that make this much more complicated, but what exactly are those factors?

High-quality, reliable data is crucial to getting most things done in healthcare, especially for healthcare interoperability. However, having the data alone isn’t enough – we need to be able to share our data between healthcare entities. Without having the same data sets, how else are our organizations and different healthcare entities supposed to work together seamlessly? We’ve made some great strides in improving interoperability, in no small part due to the Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement (TEFCA).

So let’s take a moment to check in and examine the current state of healthcare – how is interoperability in healthcare advancing and what role does TEFCA play in facilitating seamless data sharing among healthcare entities? We reached out to our brilliant Healthcare IT Today for their insights into this question, the following is what they had to share.