What You Should Know:
– Autonomous coding enjoys a high level of trust among healthcare finance professionals who use or plan to use the technology, according to new survey from the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) on behalf of AGS Health.
– The survey reveals 45 percent of healthcare financial professionals indicate autonomous coding often works well and 16 percent place their complete trust in it. However, despite its emergence as a powerful tool for streamlining and improving error-prone manual coding processes, autonomous coding suffers from an awareness problem, with 52 percent saying they do not know what it is.
The Promise of Autonomous Coding for Revenue Cycle
Among the key benefits of autonomous coding is its ability to eliminate the potential for human errors that result in missed reimbursement opportunities, backlogs, delays, and claims errors, and its ability to push accuracy levels to near-perfect percentages. All of which can be achieved in near real-time with the right integration pipelines. Autonomous coding is also faster than its human counterparts – it can complete charts in seconds – yet it also understands what it does not know, flagging it for human review.
Despite fewer than half of respondents saying they fully understand autonomous coding, survey results nonetheless indicated that finance professionals are very aware of its potential:
· Nearly 67 percent believed it would accelerate the revenue cycle
· 63 percent said it would improve coding accuracy
· More than 59 percent indicated it would reduce the need for human intervention
· Nearly 56 percent said it would lower overall costs to the healthcare provider
· More than 48 percent responded that it would optimize coding for the greatest reimbursement
· Just over 23 percent said it would improve patient satisfaction
· More than 22 percent said it would improve patient care
“Autonomous coding is a rapidly maturing solution for many of the most significant pain points plaguing the healthcare revenue cycle, and we are already seeing its impact with productivity increasing by 20-35% on average,” said Emily Bonham, Senior Vice President of Product Management for AGS Health. “However, pushing its adoption past the tipping point requires closing the knowledge gap among healthcare finance leaders on what to expect from autonomous coding as well as how to design, deploy, and optimize a solution that works best for their organization’s needs.”
Survey Background/Methodology
AGS Health commissioned this survey of more than 450 healthcare finance professionals during the HFMA Annual Conference to determine the extent to which autonomous coding is taking hold in the healthcare industry. It also sought to pinpoint the value hospitals and health systems are gaining from a tech-enabled approach to coding and the barriers that stand in the way of implementation.
