Beyond the Denial Epidemic

By Patrick Leonard, CEO, CorroHealth

Originally Published on Becker’s Hospital Review

Facing an unprecedented surge in payer denials, the healthcare industry confronts a pivotal challenge that threatens its foundational mission of patient care and jeopardizes hospital stability nationwide. This growing crisis, intensified by aggressive payer tactics and compounded by lack of enforcement, has escalated to an epidemic scale, highlighting a dire need for fundamental reforms. The path forward demands adopting strategies that emphasize accountability, strategic foresight, data-driven insights, and collaboration, ensuring healthcare institutions can overcome and reaffirm their commitment to delivering quality care.

A recent report from Premier, Inc. validates the challenges healthcare providers face and highlights the daunting path ahead. When hospitals spend $20 billion in a single year to overturn half of originally denied claims, enforcement of existing rules and regulations is merely climbing back up to ground level/ plugging the hole in the boat. This exhaustive process not only drains valuable time, energy, and money, but the delay in patient care directly harms the communities that hospitals exist to serve. 

In the face of this growing crisis, those with the expertise to bridge the gap between care and compensation have become the stewards of a movement pressing for these long-overdue changes. The increase in payer denials has catalyzed a transformation in the role of clinical leaders, making them indispensable navigators at the intersection of patient care and financial sustainability. Armed with a profound understanding of clinical processes and the complexities of healthcare billing, these leaders have become essential advocates for fair reimbursements. Their ability to translate complex medical scenarios into the billing realm ensures that patient care narratives are both accurately represented and financially recognized.

Payer denial tactics pose a formidable challenge, necessitating a sophisticated and strategic response. At CorroHealth, we leverage proprietary KPIs and data-driven insights to champion a proactive approach that anticipates and mitigates denials at their source. Our clinical leaders play pivotal roles, guiding our hospital partners with innovative strategies that extend beyond conventional appeals to address the root causes of denials. By empowering and supporting clinical leadership, we enable hospitals to achieve a future where clinical excellence and financial stability are intertwined, demonstrating through action that effective denial management leads to improved healthcare delivery and financial resilience.

Our clinical leaders’ expertise is supported by synthesized, insightful data-backed knowledge.  The true power of data analytics in healthcare lies not just in the volume of data collected but in the depth of the questions asked and the actionable insights derived. By utilizing clinically led proprietary KPIs such as Net Patient Realization™, we uncover payer trends and behaviors. These key indicators are instrumental in systematically unraveling the complexities of payer denial tactics, empowering our clinical leaders to steer hospital partners with innovative strategies that go beyond conventional appeals and escalation paths. This sophisticated approach to data analysis has successfully recovered billions in compliant revenue. Integrating clinical expertise with financial acumen advances hospitals towards a future where clinical excellence and financial stability are harmoniously integrated. 

As we look to the future, overcoming the challenges of payer denials requires more than just temporary fixes; it demands a revolution in how we approach healthcare reimbursement. By fostering strong, strategic partnerships, empowering our clinical leadership, continued innovation in data analytics and technology, we can transform these challenges into opportunities for growth and improvement. True partnerships and dedication to innovation is where we can work together to improve your hospital’s financial health, so you can focus on patient care. 

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