“Because of Rivet estimates we've been able to collect over 92.5% of patient responsibility in the same calendar year, amounting to over $1M in pre-collections.”
Patient cost estimates for Bluegrass Orthopaedics (BGO) were known to happen, but it meant a lot of phone calls and pre-collection efforts weren't where they wanted them to be; not to mention the estimates weren't always accurate.
“Because of Rivet estimates," Shannon Young, business services director at BGO said, "we've been able to collect over 92.5% of patient responsibility in the same calendar year, amounting to over $1M in pre-collections.”
And that's not all.
BGO collects 80% of patient responsibility within 90 days and collects 35% of all expected money in the same month.
"Without Rivet we wouldn’t be as successful with up front collections," Young said.
Young continued: "Rivet is now the easiest part of the job. We can create an estimate in under a minute. It’s really no time at all. Especially since my team has the procedure codes beforehand."
Kayla Ray, a member of Young's BGO pre-certification team said: "Rivet is so easy and accurate, we had an attorney call wanting a cost estimate for a client, and we weren't nervous: we could simply send them the estimate (complete with a disclaimer that it is just an estimate). I'm confident that the estimate was accurate, so it really wasn't an issue at all and before we'd be concerned."
BGO also uses Rivet for contract management and underpayment detection.
"Contract negotiation preparation tools are my favorite part of Rivet," Young said. "We used to work on a contract negotiation for months, if not longer. But with Rivet we can get negotiation preparations done so much quicker. What used to take 1-2 months can now be done in less than a week. There’s no way we could prepare for negotiations that quickly without Rivet."
At the time of BGO's interview with Rivet, they had 3 contract negotiations in various stages: one just sent, one in progress, and one successfully negotiated. "We had a consulting firm that did our negotiations for us, but with Rivet we saw better places for negotiation and we could do a better job at preparing for negotiation."
For underpaid claims, Young said she downloaded Rivet's spreadsheet to prove to Anthem that they were underpaying BGO by thousands of dollars. BGO has since recouped those dollars. "We were able to monitor the underpayment project through to payment right from Rivet," Young said.
"This tool has taken so much manual work from me," Young continued. "I can just go into Rivet and get work done in a matter of minutes. I’m team Rivet all the way."
Young said she's even been surprised by the benefits she gets through Rivet.
"Our therapy director asked for his top 6 codes and the reimbursement from each insurance carrier for those codes. It literally took me 10 minutes to have a report for him. Prior to Rivet it would have been a very manual process that would've taken hours."
Young explained: "Before, I’d have to write down each code, each insurance and would have had to look up each one individually for each insurance. We have a new hand doctor that’s constantly asking for reimbursement rates for different procedures that he wants to do in house. The only downside is that now the doctors think everything can be done that fast and we have to say not everything works that fast."
Young said if you're conscientious, Rivet does anything you need.
"There are so many wonderful tools, but if you aren’t being intentional, you aren’t getting everything you could from Rivet."
Learn more about Rivet's robust patient cost estimates and payer performance tools now: Schedule a Rivet demo