A new company may soon be handling the Commonwealth Health Center\u2019s collections after the management confirmed plans to solicit bids from collection companies to take care of the hospital\u2019s receivables.<\/p>\n
Commonwealth Healthcare Corp. CEO Esther Mu\u00f1a told the board of trustees that the performance of their current collection firm\u2014the Guam Marianas Collection Agency\u2014 is up for evaluation. \u201cIt\u2019s due for re-evaluation \u2026 and we\u2019re going to analyze their performance. It\u2019s about time to go ahead and open the bid [for collection],\u201d said Mu\u00f1a in response to queries on how GMCA has performed in the years it\u2019s been doing business with the hospital.<\/p>\n
According to board trustee Roy Rios, the board\u2014in its effort to boost the agency\u2019s revenue and collection\u2014has to know the effectiveness of the management\u2019s existing collection efforts. Rios specifically asked how much GMCA is bringing to CHCC each month. The data was not available last week.<\/p>\n
It was learned that GMCA is usually given boxes of files of self-pay patients to bill.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we asked them to do is help us on our backlogs [of self-pay patients],\u201d said Muna.<\/p>\n
Early last year, a federal team of medical experts recommended getting rid of the hospital\u2019s contract with its collection agency, describing it as costly and not fully integrated with the CHCC\u2019s business office.<\/p>\n
As part of the hospital\u2019s sustainability plan, the team said that getting rid of the contract can be done by September 2014, in anticipation of the completion of the revenue cycle automation then proposed by the corporation. The same team recommended that self-pay debt collection be returned to the business office.<\/p>\n
GMCA currently does the billing and collection work for the hospital. It uses its own financial system and only gets paid when it actually collects money for the hospital. GMCA\u2019s contract provides a 25-percent fee for what it collects and a 10-percent fee for billing works. <\/p>\n
During Thursday\u2019s continuation of the board meeting, vice chair Pete Dela Cruz reiterated his view about the corporation\u2019s \u201cpoor collection efforts.\u201d<\/p>\n
Based on the financial data presented last week, Dela Cruz said that there\u2019s $17 million in collectibles due the healthcare agency. <\/p>\n
Target<\/strong> <\/p>\n In her annual report submitted to the board last week, Mu\u00f1a conceded that \u201cthere are still missed opportunities for collections and revenue improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n She bared plans to improve the collections and fill the revenue gaps. These include assessing the current revenue cycle operation flows and current business staffing; standardizing productivity; improving billing and coding and charge capture workflow; improving relationship\/contract with insurance companies; and re-evaluating the charge master, among others.<\/p>\n Muna also revealed that a request for proposal for the revenue cycle improvement project, which is federally funded, is scheduled for re-announcement this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A new company may soon be handling the Commonwealth Health Center\u2019s collections after the management…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[54,56,666],"class_list":["post-32967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","tag-agency","tag-business-3","tag-chcc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32967\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}