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Billing Site Visit to Austin Health
Austin Health is a 3-campus public hospital group in Melbourne with 980 beds, 99,552 admissions per year and $700 million annual revenue.
PBRC Site Visit
Alec Peterson, Manager Financial Information Systems, hosted a visit from the PowerHealth Solutions conference delegates to Austin Health, where he shared Austin Health’s experiences with the PowerBilling & Revenue Collection (PBRC) system.
Austin Health has been using PBRC since 2011, starting with inpatient accommodation billing, and progressively phasing in private practice billing and the integration of services from other hospital systems. The new system automated many manual paper-based internal & external processes, introduced electronic billing, and streamlined business processes.
Improved Cash Flow
With the PBRC automated billing process, Austin Health saw a significant reduction in the billing cycle from weeks to days, resulting in faster revenue flows, decreased debtor balances and improved cash flow.
Increased Revenue
When service systems were later integrated into PBRC, service data started flowing automatically into the PBRC system electronically instead of being manually keyed in. This greatly improved billing accuracy through the reduction of keying errors and correct billing of many entitled services which had previously been missed.
For example, due to their new ability to bill for each visit instead of at the end of the treatment term (up to 8 weeks), Austin Health recovered an additional 4.5% revenue for radiation oncology services which previously would have had to be written off.
Improved Accountability
With the digitisation of transactions, Austin Health experienced a greater transparency in invoicing as everything was recorded and visible in the system, making it much easier to identify & fix issues and resulting in clean and correct billing records.
Improved Efficiency in Private Practice Billing
An example of improved efficiency is the distribution of private practice reporting to the doctors. An external reporting product extracts information from PBRC and automatically emails these reports in PDF format to the preferred email address of the Doctor on a monthly basis.
For example:
Previous Process |
Current Process |
DB1 form sent to doctor for approval first before sending to Medicare. |
Doctors are on automatic approval for almost all areas. |
Manual distribution of printed reports. |
Automated monthly email distribution of reports. |
Speed of the billing process depended on the travel of paper forms through the manual system. |
No approval required before billing, however very transparent to the doctors of what has been billed. |
Reports were lost and never returned to Billing. |
Reports have an email trail and are seldom lost. |
A big thank you to Alec and his team at Austin Health for sharing their experiences with PBRC. For further details, email Alec.
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