Mark your Calendar 2018 Spring Conference

April 18th and 19th, 2018

AAHAM AKSARBEN CHAPTER

Spring Conference

AAHAM AKSARBEN CHAPTER

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reservations: Book your group rate for AAHAM You will find the information for your online reservation link above. If you have questions or need help with the link, please do not hesitate to ask. We appreciate your business and look forward to a successful

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2018 Spring Conference April 18th and 19th, 2018

Fairfield Inn & Suites 805 Allen Drive

Grand Island NE 68803 308-381-8980

AKSARBEN

Spring 2018

Advantage

2018 is in full swing and we have some exciting changes coming. We are exploring some options to im-prove our local website and National has implemented a social network utilizing the Might Network. More information on the Mighty Network can be found on page ??. Dayle Harlow has agreed to fill our vacant spot of Vice President. She is also currently our education chair. In filling this position, that completes our board and officers for this year. Even though this fills all positions we can still always use additional help for Chairs or co-chairs. Marge Harris has been our treasurer for many years and is now retired. She has agreed to stay on as our treasurer but we know we won’t be able to keep her forever. If you are interested in getting involved please let us know. We are to have elections in the fall for two year terms to the board and officers. Spring Conference is coming up soon. You should have received a conference brochure via email. If you did not received one, please reach out to us. We have had some emailing issues in the past and found that our Chapter emails are sometimes getting stuck in junk mail. Dayle has done an amazing job at putting to-gether our agenda. I am very excited to hear our speakers. We know with changes in staffing over the years we may not have contact information for all facilities any-more. If you know of someone that might be interested in joining our organization, please share the confer-ence information with them. You can also send me their contact information and we will have someone reach out to them. I was able to attend the national board meeting in Bonita Springs, FL in January. This will be the venue for ANI in October. I encourage you to consider this opportunity. We were able to finalize the agenda this last week and it looks to be very educational. Narrowing down the speakers was a challenge as there were many great topics. I will be attending the national board meeting the end of the month and then will join Kevin Conway at Legislative Day. Remember to follow us on Facebook, for conference information and articles. You can find our page AAHAM Nebraska Aksarben Chapter. We are also now on Twitter. Follow us @AksarbenAAHAM. Hope to see everyone in Grand Island on April 18-19th. Jenni McConville Aksarben Chapter President jmcconville@chmccook.org

Message from the President

Don’t forget to like our Facebook!

Like our page to find healthcare news that

affects us along with upcoming educations.

Feel free to contact our site administrators Chere Ray Wehling or Jenni McConville for suggestions on how to improve our page or additional information you would like to see.

Chere@sonnopc.com JMcConville@chmccook.org

AKSARBEN AAHAM BOARD & COMMITTEE CHAIRS 2018

PRESIDENT JENNI MCCONVILLE COMMUNITY HOSPITAL

VICE PRESIDENT DAYLE HARLOW

FILLMORE COUNTY HOSPITAL

TREASURER MARGE HARRIS, CRCE-P CHI HEALTH CLINIC

SECRETARY SHARON MCGUIRE CRCE-P and CPC HMS FEDERAL

BOARD CHAIR CINDY VOSSLER NEBRASKA HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION

BOARD MEMBERS SHARON MCGUIRE HMS FEDERAL (2015-2018) KEVIN CONWAY NEBRASKA HOSPITAL ASSOCIATION (2016-2018) SHELLY SOUPIR CHANGE HEALTHCARE (2016-2018) MELISSA GRIFFITH CREDIT MANAGEMENT (2017-2018) CHAD BREIDENBACH THE HAUGE GROUP (2017-2018) CARLIE HARRIS CREDIT MANAGEMENT (2017-2018)

COMMITTEE CHAIRS CERTIFICATION – BERNIE HERGOTT COMMUNICATIONS – SHELLY SOUPIR CORPORATE PARTNERS – CHAD BREI\DENBACH EDUCATION – DAYLE HARLOW ETHICS, CONSTITUTION, & BYLAWS – OPEN HISTORIAN – SHARON MCGUIRE CHAPTER EXCELLENCE - OPEN HOSPITALITY – AVID DILLARD GOVERNMENT – KEVIN CONWAY MEMBERSHIP –MELISSA GRIFFITH WAYS & MEANS – CARLIE HARRIS NOMINATING/AWARDS – OPEN

Meet the Member!

Kevin Conway servers as a Board member and Government Relations Committee Chair for the Aksarben Chapter of the American Association of Healthcare Administrative Manage-ment (AAHAM). Kevin has been active in AAHAM since first joining in 1998. Kevin is the Vice President, Health Information for the Ne-braska Hospital Association (NHA). In this role, Kevin over-sees the Nebraska Hospital Information System (NHIS) and advocates for and health information technology for the NHA members. The NHA has been representing and supporting the needs of Nebraska’s rural and urban hospitals since 1927.

Kevin has over 30 years of experience in health care planning, finance and information technology with Nebraska organizations. Prior to joining NHA in 2000, Kevin worked for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Nebraska, Lincoln General Hospital (Bryan Center West), and Tabitha Health Care Ser-vices. Along with other key stakeholders, Kevin helped the Nebraska Health Information Initiative (NeHII) Collaborative through their initial convening stages, planning and implementation. Kevin serves as Vice President for the NeHII Board of Directors. Kevin also works with Nebraska hospitals towards compliance and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). With the increased prominence of healthcare information technology, Kevin worked with a group on interested individuals to form a Nebraska chapter for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). He served as the Nebraska HIMSS Chapter President during the initial year, then Program Chair and now serves as Government Relations Chair. He has also held board positions and served as President for local chapters of the Institute of Industrial Engineers; and is also active in the Nebraska Health Care Financial Management Association (HFMA). Kevin graduated from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln with a bachelors of science degree in industrial engineering. In addition to being active in the Lincoln community, Kevin coached youth soccer, and volunteered in community support activities.

Reap the benefits of having AAHAM certified staff at your organization!

AAHAM offers a complete career ladder to help you advance your career. AAHAM Certified Revenue Cycle Executive (CRCE) AAHAM Certified Revenue Cycle Professional (CRCP) AAHAM Certified Revenue Cycle Specialist (CRCS) AAHAM also offers specialized certification options for Revenue Integrity and

Compliance. AAHAM Certified Revenue Integrity Professional (CRIP) AAHAM Certified Compliance Technician (CCT) Thousands of people across the country already enjoy the benefits of AAHAM certification, such as increased earning potential, a strengthened resume and a real sense of pride and accomplishment related to their career. These benefits also carry over to your organization. Organizations that en-courage and incentive staff to become AAHAM certified have limited turnover as their staff are more engaged and invested in the success of the organization. Help your organization stand out by creat-ing a culture of excellence that will pay dividends for years to come. We’re looking forward to helping you succeed! Please forward this to a colleague who wants to ad-vance their career as well. Visit the AAHAM certification page for more information on certification, or call us at 703.281.4043.

The AAHAM list serve has been replaced with our new Social Network https://aaham.mn.com You can request an invite or download the Mighty Networks App from ITunes or the Google play store and join on your mobile device!

When you join our new AAHAM Social Network platform you will have access to over 3,000 healthcare revenue cycle professionals. Post a question and have access to your peers from across the country. Easy and free for all AAHAM members!!! The AAHAM member list serve can still be accessed for archive purposes in Member's Only.

New AAHAM Social Network!

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision regarding the FCC's Omnibus

2015 TCPA Declaratory Ruling and Order

D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals finally issued a decision in ACA International, et al. v. FCC regarding the FCC's Omnibus 2015 TCPA Declaratory Ruling and Order. The Court granted in part and de-nied in part the petitions for review. Bottom line: Very good for us. The decision strikes down the worst parts of the FCC order and imme-diately enhances certain defensive arguments against litigation. It also provides a clear runway for the current FCC to adopt clear, favorable interpretations and bright-line rules. And to finally address our pending petition on healthcare consent issues. The biggest takeaway is that callers in the healthcare ecosystem are no longer subject to the

FCC's expansive "autodialer" definition. The D.C. Circuit invalidated the FCC's interpretation as impermissibly broad and arbitrarily vague. While the court did not adopt an alternative definition of "autodialer," it drew the line at a definition that would cover all smartphones. And at a mini-mum, any definition must give callers meaningful guidance about their liability exposure. We ex-pect the FCC to commence a follow-on rulemaking and adopt a more sensible framework that does not risk sweeping in any and all calling technologies.

The D.C. Circuit also threw out the FCC's approach to reassigned numbers. We expect the

FCC's follow-on rulemaking to clarify (in some form) that callers are not strictly liable when they mistakenly attempt to reach a number that has been reassigned. It remains to be seen, howev-er, how the Court's decision will impact the FCC's ongoing proceeding to establish reassigned numbers database(s) for the benefit of callers.

The D.C. Circuit upheld the FCC's ruling that callers can revoke their consent through any rea-

sonable means. Nevertheless, the Court did not hold that the TCPA required such a rule. For that reason, the FCC remains free to change its framework and move to a regime where callers have more control over the means by which consumers revoke consent.

The D.C. Circuit rejected Rite Aid's attack against the FCC's decision to selectively exempt cer-

tain exigency-related, free-to-end-user healthcare calls from the consent requirements. The Court also upheld the FCC's decision to exempt certain HIPAA-governed calls to residential land-lines but not wireless numbers. RiteAid's arguments were narrow in their scope and somewhat misframed, and we expect the Court's ruling to have a modest impact, if any, on callers in the healthcare ecosystem.

The D.C. Circuit's decision leaves many TCPA issues of relevance to the healthcare ecosystem

unchanged. It does not, for example, provide further guidance/relief on what kinds of calls or texts are "marketing" and therefore require "prior express written consent." Nor does the deci-sion provide definitive clarity on the types of healthcare-related calls that fall within the "emergency purposes" exception to the consent requirement. Courts will continue to evaluate these issues on a case-by-case basis.

Billing for medical services costs hospitals huge amounts

of time and money, study finds

Healthcare costs cause sticker shock for many Americans. But so should the amount of money that hospitals spend just for processing an insurance claim. Indeed, a new study in Journal of the American Medical Association traced the administrative costs of an academic medical center as a bill went through the entire revenue cycle management process for different patient encounters, including primary care and emergency department visits. Research-ers found that the cost of billing and insurance-related activities for a single primary-care doctor is $99,000 a year and represents roughly $1 in $7 collected. For emergency room billings, the propor-tion goes even higher—to 25% of all dollars collected. Researchers at Duke University School of Medicine derived the data by interviewing 34 physicians and 27 administrators at the system who are involved in billing to chart the path of an insurance claim through the revenue cycle management process. RELATED: ACEP challenges report on ER billing fees Despite the widespread use of computerized billing, the study concluded that it took 13 minutes of time and $20.49 to process the bill for a primary care visit, and 32 minutes and $61.54 for an emer-gency room visit and discharge. If the care becomes more complex, so does the cost of the billing. For a patient undergoing an inpatient surgical procedure, it takes 100 minutes to process their bill and $215.10 in costs. The North Carolina academic health center that was examined for the study devoted so many re-sources to the process of revenue cycle management it started a separate company that employs 1,500 to handle all the billing. And the study didn’t even take into account the time and cost on the end part of commercial payers to process the bills they receive from the providers. RELATED: 4 revenue cycle management challenges for hospitals An opinion piece published in JAMA that accompanied the study concluded that the use of elec-tronic health records may in some way actually be expanding the amount of labor required to com-plete the billing process. “This study suggests that, if anything, administrative time needed for billing has increased for physi-cians and other staff as EHRs have become more widespread,” write Vivian S. Lee, M.D., Ph.D., of the University of Utah and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and Bonnie B. Blanchfield, Division of General Internal Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. They noted that the study did not even take into account the expense of amortizing the installation of EHRs into the billing process, which would likely drive up costs another 44% to 68%.

AAHAM AKSARBEN CHAPTER

Click Here

2018 Spring Conference

April 18th and 19th, 2018

Fairfield Inn & Suites 805 Allen Drive

Grand Island NE 68803 308-381-8980

Book your group rate for AAHAM

CONFERENCE REGISTRATION PACKET

AAHAM Mission Statement: To provide education, certification, networking, and advocacy for healthcare

revenue cycle professionals. QUESTIONS? Need More Information? If you have questions regarding the Spring Confer-ence, you can contact Dayle Harlow, Education Chair at 402-759-3167 or dharlow@myfch.org, Shelly Girtz-Soupir, Communications Chair at 402-651-2103 or shelly.soupir@relayhealth.com or Jenni McConville, Chapter President at 308-344-8309 or jmcconville@chmccook.org Hotel Reservation Information: The 2018 Spring Conference will be held at the Fairfield Inn & Suites – 805 Allen Drive, Grand Is-land, Ne 68803 (308-381-8980). Call and make your room reservations early as rooms are limited and the discounted AAHAM room rate of $107.95 (for single or double occupancy per night) will ex-pire on 3/24/18. You can also use the link above. **Please mention you will be attending the AAHAM conference to receive the discounted rate.

http://www.aaham.org

2018 SPRING ANNUAL MEETING

Wednesday, April 18, 2018 8:00-8:30am Registration 8:30-9:30am Provider Update / Q&A United Healthcare & UHC Community Plan 9:30-10:30am Transformational Leadership Stephanie Vanous, Zelle HR Solutions Leadership is a desired state for most managers in any given organization, however most feel that the term is abstract and unattainable. In this session, we will discuss the Transformational Leader-ship Model by Bass and Avolio. This model will provide you with context and action items in order to improve your leadership capacity. After this session, you will be equipped with a tool you can utilize in your current role to create impact with those around you. 10:30-11:00am Break and Vendor Fair 11:00 am-12:00pm Provider Update / Q&A Nebraska Total Care 12:00-1:00pm Lunch and Chapter Meeting 1:00-2:30pm AR Management Marcy Marquis, maxRTE The Key Elements to a Successful Revenue Cycle will be discussed from appointment scheduling to payment in full or third party collections. The total life of a charge, the importance of timely follow-up, denial management, monthly reports and process improvements will also be discussed in detail. 2:30-2:45pm Break 2:45-4:45pm Collecting Low Balances: Squeezing the Toothpaste Tube Kimberly Spaulding, Colburn Hill Peter Angerhofer, Colburn Hill For many years, hospitals have treated their AR like an old tube of toothpaste, eventually determining that the effort to get the last dollop was too great and tossing the tube aside, often if the form of annual clean ups and mass write-offs. While 3% of your revenue is tied up in uncollected low balance claims, they represent 85% of that volume of AR. The ever-increasing pile of low balance AR offers only ugly solutions – such as unconfidently write it off or bury it. While resolving this AR would recover up to 1% incremental net revenue, to work these claims it would require 3 to 5 times your existing PFS staff! We'd like to exchange views on this seemingly universal problem which rarely gets discussed in a clear, understandable way and the paths (such as utilizing automation) to solving this financially-significant, impactful challenge.

5:30 - 6:45pm Hospitality Room 7:00 - 8:30pm Group Dinner @ Texas Roadhouse 232 Wilmar Ave, Grand Island, NE 68803 8:45 - 10:30pm Hospitality Room Continued

Thursday, April 19, 2018 8:30-9:00am Registration and Continental Breakfast 9:00-10:00am Have No Fear Curtis Tomasevicz, two-time Olympic medalist Curt Tomasevicz grew up in Shelby, NE, which is a small town of nearly 700 people located a few miles southwest of Columbus. While attending the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Curt played running back and linebacker for the Cornhuskers, earning most of his playing time on special teams. During his senior year in 2003, he earned first-team academic All-Big 12 honors. Curt holds a Bach-elor’s and Master’s degree in electrical engineering with a minor in Astrophysics from UNL. 10:00-11:00am Provider Update / Q&A WellCare 11:00-11:30am Break and Vendor Fair 11:30am-12:00pm Nebraska Hospital Association Legislative Update David Slattery, Nebraska Hospital Association 12:00 – 1:00pm Lunch 1:00 - 2:00pm Population Health Management Scott Jones, NThrive

Population Health Management (PHM) programs are a strategic component of future state of health care organizations. The goal of PHM programs is to keep a patient population as healthy as possi-ble and minimize the need for expensive hospital services such as emergency department visits, imaging tests, and other preventable procedures. The success of these programs is directly correlat-ed to the successful transition from fee-for-service (by volume) models to fee-for-value (high quality + low resource use cost) models. To do this, savvy health care systems will implement strong data analytics and population health management tools that will report both descriptive data (what was) and predictive data (a range of what is expected) to help optimize future information capture and clinical practices. Health care sys-tems need to evolve to take advantage of the rapidly accelerating use of data analytics and develop improved health care quality practices at a greater value for their patients.

2:00 – 3:00pm Provider Update / Q&A Blue Cross Blue Shield 3:00-4:00pm The Path to Success in Proactive Denials Management & Preven-tion Glen Reiner, NThrive Of an estimated $3 trillion in healthcare claims submitted to insurance payors in 2016, $262B of those were denied. At the same time, the average cost of reworking a denied claim has increased, to over $100 per claim. Keeping cost to collect low and denials overturn success rates high is a mul-tifaceted challenge that requires analytics, technology, and staffing education and support. Join us for an informational presentation geared towards collections and denials professionals to learn prov-en strategies for protecting revenue and minimizing cost to collect. Hear how providers partnered with nThrive to tackle denials and improve billing processes for denials prevention. 4:00-4:30pm Attendee Roundtable Bring a couple of issues or questions you have that we can discuss altogether as a group to gather ideas and utilize each other’s knowledge!

End

The membership application is located in this newsletter. To discuss membership opportunities contact Chad Breidenbach at chadb@thehaugegroup.com

Member Get A Member Who do you know or work with that could benefit from educational and networking opportu-

nities available through Aksarben AAHAM?

Aksarben AAHAM is looking for new members. Next time you talk with this person make it a point to

discuss the opportunities and benefits of being a member of AAHAM.

AAHAM is the premier professional organization in healthcare administrative management. Profes-

sional development of its members is one of the primary goals of the Association. Publications, con-

ferences and seminars, benchmarking, professional certification and networking provide numerous

opportunities for increasing the skills and knowledge necessary to function effectively in today’s

healthcare environment. AAHAM actively represents the interest of healthcare administrative man-

agement professionals through a comprehensive program of legislative and regulatory monitoring

and its participation in industry groups such as ANSI, DISA, and NUBC.

Annual National Institute (ANI) (Formerly

CCAM)

Technical Certification (CRCS- I (formerly

CPAT) & CRCS- P (formerly CCAT)

National job back to assist you in searching

for and posting that special job

2015 PLATINUM LEVEL SPONSORS

Accelerated Receivables Solutions

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska

Credit Management

Wakefield & Associates

General Service Bureau/Early Out

Services Tiburon Financial, LLC

Alltran Health

2015 SILVER LEVEL SPONSORS

ARL Credit Services

Automated Accounts Management Services

General Collection

Mail Communications

Professional Choice Recovery,

Inc. Hauge Associates

AKSARBEN AAHAM Corporate Partners The Aksarben Chapter to thank all of our Corporate

Sponsors for their continued support