Revenue Cycle Management is regarded as the healthcare industry’s backbone, and it is a must for a healthcare provider’s success. A well-rounded Revenue Management Cycle is directly proportionate to a hospital’s profitability, as inefficient handling of the RCM process can directly impact the financial position.

In brief, Revenue Cycle Management Services play a significant role in safeguarding healthcare providers’ financial situation by facilitating the seamless flow of clinical and administrative functions.

A well-managed Revenue Cycle Management process serves as a link between patients, healthcare providers, and insurance companies. Many RCM firms supply their array of services to healthcare professionals worldwide. This is where Axea Solutions stands out as a reliable and trusted firm in the RCM niche.

For healthcare entities, revenue cycle management (RCM) combines several complex processes, from patient preauthorization to payment processing. Axea collaborates with partners to provide needed tools to improve the overall Revenue Cycle Management.

This incorporates clinical documentation, Coding, and clean claim submission through an all-encompassing streamlined approach. Axea leads the charge in capturing appropriate payments to maintain a stable and balanced revenue pace in a rapidly changing healthcare market.

Under the proficient leadership of Susan Gatehouse, Founder and CEO, Axea has expanded to become recognized as one of the premier Health Information Management (HIM) and revenue cycle enhancement firms, serving various clients nationwide.

The Prologue

Axea was founded in 1999 by Susan Gatehouse, Chief Executive Officer. Susan is a nationally recognized speaker, author, and content contributor, with a nearly 30-year history as a leading provider of revenue cycle solutions and innovative insights to the healthcare industry. Susan’s breadth of practical experience and her demonstration of creative and strategic thinking has been the leading factor in Axea Solutions’ success.

Susan is active and engaged within the healthcare industry, providing numerous lectures at national conferences and events for industry organizations such as AHIMA, HFMA, GHIMA, and GHA, and was a keynote speaker at the Global Conference on Public Health. In addition, she was a contributing author and editor for the book “Implementing Information Security in Healthcare: Building a Security Program” and contributed to the CDC manual, “Moving Science to Coverage.”

Susan received the Georgia Health Information Management Association Professional Achievement Award among her many professional achievements. She was named “Female vendor RCM leader to know” by Becker’s Healthcare and listed as “One of the Top 10 Most Influential Women in Technology, 2020.”

She is a member of the Editorial Board of ICD10monitor, a division of MedLearn Media, Inc., and a content contributor and frequent host on ‘Talk Ten Tuesday,’ a weekly broadcast providing news on ICD10 coding, billing, and information service for healthcare providers relative to coding and clinical documentation integrity (CDI).

On a personal note, Susan is particularly passionate about giving back and helping those most vulnerable and has developed partnerships with several local and national charities. This passion for helping others has expanded into companywide, employee volunteer endeavors, establishing a corporate culture of acting through volunteer work and giving back.

Susan is also a Certified Yoga Instructor and is currently working toward her certification in Grounded Kids Yoga. She is particularly interested in working with children to learn the benefits of health, activity, and achieving life balance at an early age. Being an avid hiker, she is passionate about the outdoors and the importance of its impact in calming everyday stressors.

The Legacy

Axea Solutions partners with healthcare organizations to ensure effective resource utilization through a signature suite of services. The company provides coding education, quality reviews, Coding and CDI audits, Revenue Cycle Advisory, safeguarding clean claims submission by addressing prebilling claim edits, supporting inpatient and outpatient denials, and value-based payment (VBP) migration.

The company functions around three primary competencies in ensuring a robust RCM that supports data quality, workflow efficiency, and appropriate reimbursement. Axea provides clients with the ability and knowledge about healthcare initiatives to facilitate a cohesive work environment and seamless assessment and review of the accuracy of medical codes using its web-based audit management platform. Following thorough scrutiny, the company ensures coding accuracy and data quality.

Understanding technology is an effective tool; Axea specializes in exemplary tuning processes for positioning automated or autonomous coding as an effective mechanism for improving productivity without jeopardizing quality. In other words, assessing organizations in their ability to determine the most advantageous process that fits their model is one of the key differentiators of Axea Solutions.

Continuum of Innovations

Axea Solutions delivers a unique variety of expert revenue cycle services and technologies that enable healthcare organizations to streamline processes and improve performance in the heart of the revenue cycle. Axea partners with health systems, hospitals, clinics, and physician practices to develop cost-effective financial solutions through detailed assessments, innovative methodologies, and multifaceted training strategies.

Axea has established a core group of experts possessing different specializations within the industry. This team renders its expertise in understanding how legacy processes work, identifying shortcomings, and providing knowledge to improve processes according to clients’ needs, available technology, and compliance to regulatory requirements.

The Axea team formulates remediation strategies that ensure accurate coding, clean claims, and fewer denials with their discoveries. With this unique team of specialists, Axea has emerged as a leader in the industry, having the knowledge and experience to uncover hidden and dormant issues that affect financial outcomes at core revenue cycle stages.

The company offers coding education and training with Axea Academy® to enhance the knowledge and productivity of coding teams and help them better comprehend the quality of the diagnosis and procedural coding. The Axea Academy platform was specifically developed to support comprehensive education to coders, physician or hospital settings, and clinical documentation improvement specialists. Axea recently introduced groundbreaking technology to simplify, streamline and automate tasks in the audit process, AccuTrend. Multiple users and teams can view, track, and manage audit projects to analyze information to work smarter and improve performance in the centralized platform.

By simplifying management capabilities, they can prioritize their ever-competing initiatives and let the technology provide insight into the educational process.

With a broad scope of expertise in providing a well-functioning RCM within health care institutions, the company is looking ahead with technology solutions to maintaining proficient data management and integration capabilities that will enrich data and ultimately support an organization’s effort to submit a clean claim and archive verified quality data.

Axea’s foundational knowledge reaches beyond simply coding and documentation; it expands to the clinical aspects of the revenue cycle. The Axea team members have a holistic understanding of the revenue cycle, the importance of technology, and its functionality to troubleshoot to evaluate, validate, and resolve accuracy of coding, documentation, and claims submission.

In addition to the core services, the company offers edit remediation. When it comes to out-patient services and inpatient claims, most of the charges are generated electronically from a chargemaster, which results in billing edits. In such a scenario, before a claim is submitted to the payer, it is run through an automated auditing system that encompasses national amendments. Axea Solutions rectifies the billing document through formulated strategies before billing. This is a highly complex, granular approach to ensure data accuracy and reduce the amount of denied claims and delayed payments.

Technological developments in healthcare have been critical in saving patients’ lives and have also made a tremendous impact on the processes and practices within healthcare organizations.  As the healthcare industry has evolved, so has Axea Solutions.  Recognizing that the accuracy of medical diagnosis and procedural coding drives the accuracy of predictive modeling and outcomes, directly affecting the financial stability of a healthcare organization ─Axea invested in developing technologies to enhance accuracy and workflows for healthcare systems.

These custom technologies include Axea Academy®, the only configurable, online training and education for ICD -10, CPT, and E&M with built-in tools specifically designed to enable Coding and Healthcare Managers to access web-based coder training and a comprehensive management tool for training, coding evaluations, and trending information.

One of its innovative technologies, AccuTrend, provides healthcare organizations with one centralized platform where revenue cycle audits take place and delivers self-service access to coding audit results, individual coder performance, and the progression of an audit.

The web-based platform replaces manual processes, providing transparency to auditing teams and managers’ full reporting capabilities.  AccuTrend manages results for organizations and provides recommendations in real-time — Anywhere, anytime.

Overcoming the Adversities

With Axea’s clients being front and center in the pandemic, its focus was on how best to support them during the COVID-19 crisis. Many healthcare organizations were significantly impacted by the sudden lack of resources in the revenue cycle and coding arena. The collective experience of its team enabled the company to be nimble in its efforts to provide the services needed in response to the crisis in healthcare.

Many outsourced services were suddenly halted, leaving hospitals with a tremendous gap in workflow and resources. Axea stepped in and aided to fill this gap for multiple clients.

In addition, Coding and Charging associated with COVID 19 were two functions that posed a significant risk for healthcare systems during and post-pandemic.

To address the various documentation complexities and extensive coding guidelines for COVID-related inpatient and outpatient claims, Axea developed a COVID-19 Risk Assessment Guide. In addition, the company provided training and education to the industry on financial and compliance risks around COVID-19.

Ensuring Permutation in the Niche

Axea recognized the need in the industry for valuable training and education as part of a holistic approach to proper medical documentation and coding. With this, Axea developed Axea Academy®, a web-based, industry-leading training platform for ICD-10, CPT, and E&M medical coding.

The online training courses and interactive learning tools in Axea Academy® are designed to support comprehensive management of coders and coding teams and allow managers to quickly alter training schedules based on workload, department, and coder capacity.

Whether it is specialty-specific coder training or coder advancement from outpatient to inpatient, Axea has a proven track record in implementing training programs for small to large organizations nationwide.

The retention of coders who complete Axea Academy’s training programs averages above 90 percent. It is divided by body system and includes online learning, testing, and reporting capabilities, designed to simplify management’s ability to track coder improvement.

Embracing the Future Roadmap

People and technology power today’s healthcare systems’ revenue cycle: Clinical care, coding, quality, and other professionals share information that fuels the process.

Putting a tailored skillset in place along with the right technology enables teams to gain self-service access to evolving industry requirements, automate tasks, and share and analyze data to work smarter and improve performance – Axea focuses on increasing efficiencies while decreasing the burden on care providers, to deliver impactful insight into the “real-time” experience of a patient’s overall encounter and the clinical outcome.

The services we provide are all-encompassing in attaining accurate reimbursement, solid clinical documentation, and clean claims submission to decrease the number of claim denials.

Recognition of Achievements

Since its inception, these testimonials prove that Axea’s significant and exponential achievements are reaching greater heights

“I feel compelled to thank you for AccuTrend. This program makes auditing so much easier! Wow, I’m so impressed with it and think it will make life so much easier for everyone on my staff!”- Revenue Cycle Auditor.

“Axea Academy® is a dream platform for coding managers and coders alike. From cross training and onboarding new employees to reinforcing knowledge and assessing both team and individual achievement, it’s easy to use, incorporates all facets of learning – verbal, written, and tactical, and provides a real education that goes well beyond simply reading material.”- RHIA, Director of Coding Operations.

“Axea Academy prepared me to successfully take the CM and PCS coding portion of the RHIA exam. Its step-by-step guided approach, moving sequence of information, and replicated imaging of the official coding guidelines were most helpful. Axea Academy is a phenomenal platform that I highly recommend for learning CM and PCS coding.”- Hertencia Bowe, Ed. D, RHIA, FAHIMA, Bowe Academic Consulting, LLC.

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