Blue Mountain Hospital has been recognized by the National Rural Health Resource Center for its use of innovative approaches to improve the organization’s financial stability.
The Best Practices Recognition, presented by the Technical Assistance and Services Center (TASC), a program of the National Rural Health Resource Center, and the Federal Office of Rural Health Policy, annually recognizes one of the country’s critical access hospitals, small rural hospitals, rural emergency medical services agencies or rural health clinics for its adoption of best practices to improve organizational efficiency and stability.
The hospital, an 11-bed critical access hospital located in Blanding, Utah, earned the honor for its use of data and data analytics to, among other things, identify and recover revenue losses amid escalating denials from insurance companies and government-funded health insurance plans like Medicare and Medicaid.
Blue Mountain staff have so far recouped more than $1 million in denied payments and reduced the hospital's denial rate — the percentage of bills submitted to insurance companies and insurance plans that are denied payment — by nearly 20%.
“Before this project, we spent more time getting data than analyzing it,” said Kent Turek, the hospital’s chief financial officer. “By utilizing the new dashboards, we have been able to expand our workforce ability with billers to see where they are struggling or excelling.”
The hospital's new focus on data — made possible through support from the Utah Office of Primary Care and Rural Health, and the Utah Office of Health Equity — included integrating claims and payment data with clinical data from its electronic health record system. The integration provides a truer and more holistic view of the quality and cost of patient care, and enables administrators to use data-driven decision-making tools to help reduce costs, improve patient care, determine service line needs and address geography-based health disparities.
Turek said the hospital’s move to rely more heavily on data highlights the culture that is being fostered within the organization.
“We can [now] jump in and discover new things, monitor key performance indicators and enact real-time change,” he said.
And, perhaps most valuable of all, the data is presented to hospital staff in a meaningful way that allows immediate action, said compliance director Cari Spillman.
“As a result, we look at data in a completely different way,” Spillman said. “I had no idea our own data had that much power.”
Nominations for the Best Practices Recognition were solicited from state Medicare Rural Hospital Flexibility (Flex) Program and Small Rural Hospital Improvement Program (SHIP) staff across the country.
“The Utah Flex Program is proud of Blue Mountain Hospital for embracing the opportunity to act on their data to enact real-time change to patient care and revenue cycle improvements,” said Liz Craker, the Utah Office of Primary Care and Rural Health’s health systems support coordinator.
The hospital will receive a certificate of recognition and be profiled in the TASC monthly newsletter and on the TASC program website.
