Allegan General Hospital (AGH) is a not-for-profit, acute care facility located in western Michigan in a rural community, servicing an area of approximately 41,000 residents. AGH serves a large population of self-employed construction and manufacturing workers as well as indigent, Medicaid and Medicare patients. This patient population indicates the hospital faces possible write-offs due to patients’ inability to pay and shrinking reimbursements from Medicare and Medicaid.

The patient registration process and regulations are complex and often hard to understand. In addition, verification of payer information is important. Payer benefit information is often available via web sites and telephone access, but it’s time consuming and can be cumbersome to obtain complete and accurate information. Ensuring staff understand the importance of completing the verification steps and why it’s important is challenging. Denial of payment or rework of payment claims costs AGH both time and money. AGH management realized that it was critical to train staff on how to properly register patients and reduce patient registration errors, resulting in lost time and reimbursement. Management also wanted staff to understand where their work fit in the revenue cycle and how errors cost the organization.

Based upon the criteria provided from AGH, SAP Litmos Courses developed a customized “Understanding the Revenue Cycle” curriculum and learning experience. The goal of the program is to provide a broader base of knowledge about the Revenue Cycle to help the students understand how their specific work fits in, and how errors cost the organization money.

Implementing SAP Litmos’s online curriculum has allowed AGH to drastically cut the time required to train staff on the revenue cycle and patient registration concepts. This decision saves AGH both time and money and has given the staff many tools to reduce registration errors. Now, staff better understands how their job fits in the hospital’s revenue cycle, resulting in a reduced turnover rate. Educational activities are accessed via the Internet and available 24/7, so healthcare staff can learn when it is convenient for them. Printable job aids, reference hyperlinks and concrete skill-building activities are all a part of the educational experience. Managers can create custom reports showing the time students spent on courses, their grades, and other information for each student.