As featured in Healthcare Business Review
Published: July 19, 2021
Since the dawn of 2020, the coronavirus has been a major concern for healthcare providers at the forefront of ensuring people’s health and well-being. While patients’ health is paramount, many also worry about the pandemic’s impact on their revenue cycle and financial operations, especially as patients postponed elective procedures. On the flip side, healthcare facilities witnessed a surge in patient footfall with the explosive demand for COVID testing. Unfortunately, many were unequipped to handle this influx of patients, gather their demographic and insurance information, perform clinical documentation, and ensure timely reimbursement. This disruption to the norm not only threatened their financial stability but reinforced the need to replace their conventional models with advanced technologies that can optimize their revenue cycle despite volume fluctuations or resource constraints.
Massachusetts-based FrontRunnerHC is at the forefront in providing ground-breaking technologies to meet the dynamic healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM) requirements. Founded in 2010, the company helps clients maximize reimbursements and improve patients’ billing experience with SaaS solutions that ensure reliable patient demographic, insurance, and financial information. “Missing and inaccurate patient data create big problems for an organization, like revenue loss, increased costs, wasted staff time, and frustrated patients.” says John (JD) Donnelly, FrontRunnerHC CEO. “We find and fix the errors so they can focus on patient care and get paid for their services with more clean claims going out the door.”
Ensuring labs, hospitals, physician groups, and others – even government entities – have real-time access to accurate patient information requires powerful capabilities. Proprietary network connections with access to over 2000 data sources and robotic process automation (RPA) enable FrontRunnerHC to tailor its software to each client’s patient population and conduct automated demographic verification, insurance eligibility, and insurance discovery to map accurate information such as MCO’s and Medicare Advantage Plans. The solutions are also HIPAA, SOC2, and CORE-compliant.
What gives FrontRunnerHC an extra edge is its business model built around three pillars—innovation, collaboration, and agility. Adhering to the principle, “together, we get results,” FrontRunnerHC collaborates with clients to identify their challenges and build patient-centric solutions to overcome these obstacles.
The company leverages its agility to act quickly. For example, as FrontRunnerHC observed the pandemic starting overseas, they pivoted their product development efforts. The resulting COVID-Assist solution enables labs to process an unlimited number of COVID tests daily without impacting their administrative staffing level. The automated solution helps them with insurance verification, identification of uninsured patients, and compliance with HRSA.
The final pillar of innovation is in FrontRunnerHC’s DNA, allowing it to conceptualize and develop the “next thing” that supports clients’ financial stability, growth, and patient centricity. Their newest solution, LabXchange, testifies to its quest toward pushing the boundaries of innovation.
FrontRunnerHC’s goal with LabXchange is to help organizations streamline operations by ensuring information errors are caught upfront, avoiding bottlenecks and rework down the line. Donnelly shares, "A consistent theme with healthcare organizations is that the data often comes in bad. If bad data is not fixed up front, it will have a negative downstream effect. We help them fix it." LabXchange automatically captures accurate patient information at order entry, cutting errors, time, and paperwork. This vendor-agnostic solution allows users to electronically register patients for a full compendium of tests or services. It also enables direct communication with patients – for example, notification when test results are ready and ability to view their results instantaneously.
Having experienced the value proposition of LabXchange, the Director of Kansas Health and Environmental Laboratories, N. Myron Gunsalus, Jr, said, “This new electronic order entry approach enables us to expedite the COVID testing process with confidence and provide more people throughout our state with the important results they need. Both the public and our healthcare workers will benefit.”
Another testament to its three corporate pillars is FrontRunnerHC’s efforts to support telehealth services. They recently partnered with San Francisco-based ixlayer to enable the continued growth of telehealth by providing healthcare organizations with a more efficient payment collection and reimbursement process and a more transparent patient billing experience.
Moving ahead, FrontRunnerHC is committed to continuing to spearhead innovation excellence that enables their clients to process the right healthcare claims with the first submission, something that benefits their patients, referring physicians, staff, and bottom line.
Original article as featured (on page 34-35) in: https://www.healthcarebusinessreview.com/magazines/July2021/RCM/?digitalmagazine#page=34