Using Margin Management to Enhance Profitability

Although health providers face increasing costs and declining reimbursement, most providers still address expenses and revenues as if they were unrelated issues.

Many providers are finding, however, that this disparate type of response no longer generates significant returns. Accenture has therefore created an innovative and integrated approach to margin management that helps clients on their journey to high performance, by addressing cost and revenue issues within the same context.

By leveraging broad experience with both revenue cycle and supply chain issues in health organizations, we help health providers improve charge capture, revenue management, product management and logistics across their entire institution.

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Accenture helps health providers on their journey toward high performance by addressing cost and revenue issues in the same context.

Our research suggests that sustainable improvements are more likely to occur in the presence of ongoing process improvement. To help this happen, we collaborate with clients to leverage our extensive clinically trained staff and experience to focus on physician engagement and adoption.

We promote knowledge capture and sharing throughout our clients' organizations, especially in new product evaluation, product standardization, denial management and cash acceleration. We balance decentralized management and decision-making with common processes, tools and infrastructure.

Our approach is flexible and uses either an enterprise-wide technology platform or an "overlay" on top of existing legacy systems.

Specific margin management opportunities that can accelerate companies' journey toward high performance include:

• Item Master/charge Description Master Integration: We help to integrate content, cost and one-to-one or one-to-many relationships between data sets.
  
  
• Charge Capture Enhancement: We work collaboratively with client IT staff to develop system reports for charge reconciliation as well as department-specific training materials for clinical departments.
  
  
• Strategic Managed Care Contracting: We help providers to improve their business performance by incorporating their successes in measuring product usage, improving charge capture and reducing receivables into managed care contracting.

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