By George Florentine, VP, Technology

As the healthcare landscape continues to morph through M&As and healthcare system consolidations, revenue cycle teams face an increasingly difficult task of providing timely, efficient, and high-quality support to their business and clinical partners.

M&A activity frequently results in the partial retirement of legacy systems―new EHR and pay cycle systems are introduced but legacy systems are kept online to enable the collection of outstanding accounts receivable (AR) and long-term receivable assets.

The desire to convert these corporate assets into recognizable revenue is a valuable financial process but can result in the long-term maintenance of legacy systems.

Legacy systems typically run on obsolete technology stacks, and the continued use of these stacks may incur more overall cost than the value of the AR accounts themselves. These systems may be operated for years until a hardware failure occurs. This makes the systems unusable and forces the organization to recognize all their outstanding AR as bad debt and has a negative impact on the corporate balance sheet.

Manage Legacy Accounts with Flatirons Digital Hub for Healthcare

Flatirons Digital Hub for Healthcare addresses these challenges. It provides an on-premise or cloud-based solution for managing legacy pay cycle system accounts. The solution enables providers and payers to archive their legacy pay cycle applications into a central archive, along with other clinical and non-clinical systems (HR, purchasing, asset management, etc.).

Once archived, pay cycle users can incrementally process AR payments, either through an interactive portal or through back office integrations with 3rd party collection services.

How It Works

Flatirons Digital Hub supports the creation of both debit and credit entries and provides web-based reporting. This helps revenue cycle staff quickly assess outstanding current balances, out for collection balances, and account insurance information as well as patient account information.

The system also:

  • Isolates pre-archived account transaction from post-archive financial transaction addenda, enabling pay cycle staff to easily respond to regulatory or legal requests for information regarding the activities performed in the legacy system while enabling the continuing operation of account receivable collections.
  • Provides a flexible, customizable user interface and underlying data model definition, which enables the archiving of disparate legacy revenue cycle systems into a single archive.
  • Integrates with current EHR and eMPI solutions so that staff may easily work in both current production systems as well as Flatirons Digital Hub.

Healthcare organizations that have adopted Flatirons Digital Hub for Healthcare can realize an increase in the efficiency and accuracy of their revenue cycle staff. Recognizing cost recovery from the retirement of legacy systems and their supporting hardware infrastructure is a big incentive to get started.