A Look Back at ACCC NOC 2020
This year’s 37th annual ACCC National Oncology Conference looked very different from previous years. Like most industry events and conferences this year, it was transformed into a virtual event, but we’re happy to say that the value of the event was definitely not lost. We were able to join in on many different sessions over the five-day virtual event, and our team saw that connections were still being made and ideas were being shared, even remotely. Thank you to the ACCC team for transitioning this event into a virtual one that we could all still benefit from.
One of the sessions that was particularly relevant to what we do here at TailorMed was “Revenue Cycle Optimization,” led by Christina Fuller, BSW, Oncology Patient Financial Navigator at Mosaic Life Cancer Care. It was a great example of how to engage virtual conference-goers. Fuller began by creating a friendly environment and aligning all participants on the topic, definitions, and functions of the various areas of the revenue cycle: from gathering of demographic information, referrals and authorizations, through documentation, coding, and all the way into the claims and denials portion. This set the stage for a great discussion.
TailorMed’s Director of Financial Navigation, Clara Lambert, shared her insights on the session, and how it brought value to the participants. “The discussion moved quickly to financial navigation, which Christina identified as falling in between the revenue cycle stages of data entry of demographics and insurance information, and obtaining referrals and authorizations. We also discussed the increasingly relevant theme of how to overcome the challenges of assisting patients remotely, especially patients whose financial burdens have increased with the onset of COVID-19. Some mentioned that their teams have continued pursuing authorizations from their home offices through the COVID-19 pandemic, and we discussed various strategies they were using to assist with authorizations.”
The participants also brought up another recurring challenge that financial navigators run into: the overwhelming amount of manual processes required with the work. There is pressure to manually enter as many claims as possible, which increases the risk of human error. Technology like financial navigation solutions can be utilized to automate manual processes and project out-of-pocket patient costs.
