ActivTrak Drives Revenue Management Improvements for 600K-Patient Medical Center
Discover how a healthcare hybrid time tracking and billing system can improve revenue cycle management and streamline patient care.
Overview
As one of the oldest and largest public hospital district systems in Washington, this medical center serves more than 600,000 residents. It’s home to one of the state’s busiest emergency departments and operates more than 48 primary, urgent and specialty care clinics. In other words: There are a lot of patient care cases to manage. Which means high-performance revenue cycle management is critical to success.
The only problem? The center’s productivity monitoring tool wasn’t keeping up with those needs. The team understood the importance of workforce optimization and wanted to make sure the organization’s 5,100 employees served the community as efficiently and effectively as possible. But with just one IT manager in charge of revenue management, they needed better support.
Challenge
When the center decided to implement a hybrid workplace model, the IT department had a number of variables to track. There were office spaces to check for HIPAA compliance, internet speeds to monitor for reliability and daily activities to analyze for productivity. Most of the work was done manually in spreadsheets.
“The team wanted to use data to create a story about employees, but they were kind of at a loss,” recalls the organization’s IT Manager of Revenue Cycle Applications. “So I was managing everybody’s spreadsheets and was burned out on doing that.” Then someone on the team mentioned ActivTrak, and everything changed.
Solution
At first, the hospital system adopted ActivTrak to replace manual processes and upgrade from a previous tool. Within weeks, the team discovered several additional use cases to help improve revenue cycle management and workforce optimization.
ActivTrak gave the team easy access to custom dashboards and reports they use to answer questions critical to revenue cycle management, such as:
How do employees spend their time?
Is anyone at risk of burnout?
Are any software applications underutilized?
ActivTrak helps you understand what people are doing every single day, from ‘Are you pinging people on Teams all day’ to ‘Are you only using some resources because you didn’t get the training you needed on others’. It’s the Cadillac of workforce analytics.
IT Manager, Revenue Cycle Applications
Results
Within weeks, the center was already relying on ActivTrak insights to identify and address a range of issues. Today, the team partners with ActivTrak to:
Gain $110K in additional capacity
One of the most beneficial aspects of ActivTrak? Increased productivity. The workforce analytics platform keeps the center’s IT department attuned to how people spend their time when they focus, if they’re distracted by notifications and pings, and how frequently they bounce from app to app.
The team estimates those analytics have helped them save over $110,000 when making important decisions related to hiring and turnover. Capacity assessment and team workload balancing capabilities uncover opportunities to increase capacity without adding headcount. And Attendance and Working Hours reports are invaluable for reducing overtime costs.
“I don’t feel comfortable going to my senior leadership and saying I need another full time employee without ActivTrak reports,” the IT manager explains. “I can show definitively when people work at max capacity and we still can’t keep our heads above water. Then there’s no question that something has to change.”
Improve meetings (and reduce their hidden costs)
Because ActivTrak lets users drill down to granular details like multitasking and time spent in meetings, the team can see when too many resources are spent on unproductive activities.
“If there are 30 people in a meeting and only one person’s talking, you have 29 people who are not learning,” explains the center’s IT manager. “That’s a very expensive meeting for our organization.”
She notes that seeing who attends which events, down to the title level, has helped fuel conversations around the cost of overfilled meetings.
It’s really changed our culture and helped people be more thoughtful about how much time they spend on meetings. We’ve definitely saved money in this area.
Prevent burnout
ActivTrak’s Workload Balance, Team Comparison and Personal Insight reports made the center aware of times when employees devoted too many personal hours to work.
“I discovered I didn’t realize how much personal time some people devoted to our hospital,” the IT manager recalls. “They think ‘I’m just going to stay on for a couple more minutes’… and end up consistently staying on two or three hours more than they should, every single day. Being caregivers, we recognize that’s not beneficial.”
Armed with ActivTrak reports, managers can have important conversations with employees before burnout leads to bigger issues like resignations or underperformance. Team workload balance and productivity goal-tracking insights provide critical information management wouldn’t otherwise have when managing remote teams.
You simply cannot have the full story without using a tool like ActivTrak.
Future Plans
The team notes that any organization looking to boost productivity and profits can benefit from using ActivTrak. Their advice for other companies is to involve employees from Day One.
“When I first rolled out Personal Insights to the team, I went through them with each person individually and talked about what my expectations were, as well as what we hope they do for self-care,” says the IT manager.
Today, the organization regularly leans on ActivTrak insights to provide proactive support for employees. In fact, the process has been so successful that many employees ask for weekly reports. Plus, it was remarkably easy to deploy.
“There are fantastic videos and resources right on the ActivTrak site,” says the team. “It’s really obvious when new features are ready, and every single time we use the chat function we get exactly what we need.”
