Tegria helped us improve our revenue cycle workflows as we transitioned to a different EHR platform. Their guidance, expertise, and willingness to tackle whatever we asked was invaluable.

Arvind Oswal, ARMC Chief Financial Officer

Background and Challenge

Arrowhead Regional Medical Center (ARMC) is a 456-bed teaching hospital in San Bernardino County, California.  It’s a busy urban emergency and trauma care center in Southern California and as a county health system supports many patients with high-quality medical services.

In February 2022, ARMC migrated from its legacy electronic health record to a new electronic health record throughout its hospital and clinics. One month before the transition, ARMC engaged Tegria to support its EHR Go-Live. ARMC requested that Tegria assess revenue cycle’s Go-live readiness, optimize revenue cycle workflows in the new system, and drive its return to pre-live revenue cycle baseline levels with a roadmap for future revenue cycle strategy for immediate post-live stabilization.

Solution

Together, Tegria and ARMC decided on the best course of action. Tegria would advise and mentor revenue cycle leadership, stand up a Revenue Integrity program, and help ARMC quickly stabilize their cost centers. In addition to revenue cycle analysts, we brought a clinical analyst with a medical background to the team. We engaged clinical leaders in a decentralized revenue reconciliation training program to focus on accurate charging within revenue generating areas. ARMC leaders received a Revenue Integrity Program playbook, Go-live resources, reference guides, and training manuals.

During Go-live, the clinical analyst worked at the elbow with clinical leaders to show them how to properly record, reconcile, and correct charges. Due to our background in clinical workflows, we were able to speak the same language as ARMC clinicians, leading to a more efficient Go-live process. Our clinical analysts were able to view operational workflows, track the charges on the backend, and successfully resolve build issues. Tegria’s revenue cycle experts simultaneously lead charge capture stabilization work groups to identify areas where revenue was missing or improperly routed from the legacy EHR. The robust integration between our clinical and revenue cycle experts facilitated prompt resolution to Go-live concerns.

We enjoyed partnering with Tegria. The group was helpful and had great revenue cycle recommendations that helped us increase our charge capture and efficiency. They listened well to our needs and used their EHR expertise to meet us where we were and guide us through our transition.

Arvind Oswal

Results

The project was a success as Tegria ensured Arrowhead hit the following outcomes:

• Hit 106% charging above their baselines with all cost centers stable within 90 days of post-live
• Consolidate 85 work queues to reduce coding efforts
• Recover $182K in missing blood administration charges and $175K in missing dialysis charges
• Recover $5 million from inactive procedure logs and injection charges
• Facilitate a close working relationship between clinical operations and the newly established Revenue Integrity team