Where most technological innovation takes place in the cloud, companies are looking to expand their cloud offerings by acquiring technology and engineering resources. These acquisitions can ultimately help healthcare organizations improve their back-office processes, such as coordinating benefits at the beginning of a patient journey, while a new, proprietary benchmarking assessment tool can enable revenue cycle leaders to prioritize and plan for modernizing the technology.
Experian Health acquires Wave HDC
Experian announced Thursday that it has acquired Wave HDC, a healthcare data automation company that uses artificial intelligence to determine insurance benefit coverage and critical patient demographics for hospitals, labs, billing companies and physician groups.
Claim denials, often the result of missing or inaccurate eligibility information, contribute more than $200 billion annually to lost incomethe company said.
The addition of Wave HDC will strengthen Experian Health by adding more comprehensive and faster healthcare coverage identification and automation capabilities during patient enrollment, Experian said.
By combining Experian's clearinghouse data and Wave HDC's insurance data capture technology, users can search for critical insurance and patient data with a single query to minimize delayed reimbursements and increase efficiency, the company said.
“Our mission is to simplify healthcare, and this move allows us to rapidly scale our portfolio with advanced logic and AI-powered technology to solve one of the biggest administrative problems facing providers today faced, namely denial of claims,” Tom Cox, president of Experian Health, said in a statement.
“We believe this integration will have a powerful impact on the healthcare industry, improving financial solvency and efficiency for healthcare providers through more accurate medical billing, resulting in potentially more reimbursements, faster,” added Jordan Levitt, president and CEO of Wave HDC, to it.
Last year, Wave HDC has purchased Goodvisit, a provider of reimbursement estimating, denial prevention, and worklist tools, bringing the vendor's team and technology on board. Tom Wall, co-founder and CTO of Goodvisit, said at the time that Wave HDC's APIs were providing more healthcare systems with better data.
Accenture adds cloud developers to its AWS team
Accenture has acquired Ocelot Consulting, a cloud consulting firm specializing in full-stack development, data engineering, data science and cloud modernization strategy and execution, to expand its technical capabilities in Amazon Web Services, the company said last week.
The addition of the St. Louis, Missouri-based Ocelot Consulting team to the Accenture AWS Business Group is expected to help clients in North America accelerate cloud transformation and development of artificial intelligence systems, according to Andy Tay, global leader of Accenture Cloud First.
“Ocelot Consulting is expanding our talent base of versatile engineers to help customers build a strong digital core – powered by cloud, data and AI – and reach new performance limits,” he said in a statement.
“Over the past seven years, we have focused on sharing our transformational learnings in agility, cloud, security and development activities with other companies in the region,” said Tyler Robert, co-founder and president of Ocelot Consulting.
In January, Accenture Federal Services and Leidos partnered to support the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's cloud modernization.
New revenue cycle modernization tool available
The Healthcare Financial Management Association has announced an alliance with FinThrive, Inc., a software-as-a-service healthcare revenue cycle management provider, to jointly launch a peer-reviewed, five-phase Revenue Cycle Management Technology Adoption Model.
RCMTAM is designed to help healthcare systems use industry benchmarks to assess their current state of RCM technology maturity and create best-practice plans to optimize revenue cycle outcomes.
“A departure from conventional models, this approach prioritizes the purposeful implementation of technology within healthcare organizations,” HFMA senior vice president Richard Gundling said in a statement.
“We believe in the enhanced problem-solving capabilities of using maturity models, specifically RCMTAM, to guide organizations toward sustainable and effective revenue cycle management.”
Hemant Goel, CEO of FinThrive, explained that the company's analysis of more than 30,000 individual data points found that 42% of healthcare systems were in the earliest stages of digital transformation of their revenue cycle.
“This confirmed our hypothesis that while many healthcare systems know they need to transform and automate their revenue cycles, they have not had a blueprint to guide them,” he said in an announcement.
“Through collaboration with HFMA and healthcare early adopters, we are eager to contribute valuable insights that will enable revenue cycle leaders on the path to financial excellence in healthcare.”
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.