Cerner Responds To Value-Based Payment Models With New Leadership
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
New senior vice president of revenue cycle management will help oversee revenue cycle concerns.
As healthcare transitions to value-based payment models, Kansas City, MO-based Cerner has responded by creating a new leadership position that will help oversee revenue cycle concerns, according to Becker’s Hospital CFO.
Beginning on September 1, Jeff Hurst of Adventist health System will become the new senior vice president of revenue cycle management and president of RevWorks, Cerner’s revenue services management division. Hurst currently serves as senior vice president of finance at Adventist’s Florida Hospital in Altamonte Springs.
Cerner and Adventist have worked together for years to help maximize revenue cycle management throughout the hospital system using Cerner’s products.
“I don’t have a crystal ball — I can’t tell you exactly where healthcare is going to be 20 years from now — but what I can tell you with a degree of certainty is that payment rates are going nowhere but down,” Hurst told RevCycleIntelligence.com.
“The ability of health systems and providers across the industry to truly optimize their revenue cycle and squeeze every single dollar they can out of it, which in turn allows them to pass value on to those end shareholders, is going to be an accelerated priority in the future,” he added.
Hurst also told Becker’s Hospital Review that transparency and simplification are the key ingredients for new revenue cycle management tools. “As we move into this next evolution and iteration from a consumerism standpoint, I think there’s going to more and more pressure on the provider side, which puts more and more pressure and creates more opportunities for Cerner to deliver solutions that allow us to create that transparency that the end customers are seeking from a provider side.”
Successful RCM solutions will provide a single bill for clients with the ability to financially track a patient throughout the entire healthcare system. In a blog post, Cerner President Zane Burke explained that “We created this new role to show our continued commitment to providing the best resources to help our clients be successful,” particular in light of changing payment models and regulatory changes, combined with population health and a louder consumer voice.
Cerner is now focusing its clinically-driven revenue cycle management solution on helping its clients “optimize workflows across the continuum of care to collect and use clinical data to drive positive financial performance.”