Tackling RCM challenges in a new role at Sutter Health

Motti Edelstein [00:00:00]:

It’s really a matter of taking a step back and saying, okay, what could we have done differently? That this patient wouldn’t, would not have been left with either a high bill or such challenge to get their care. And that’s something that Sutter Health is putting at the forefront.

Narrator [00:00:26]:

From Healthcare IT leaders, You’re listening to Leader to Leader with Ben Hilmes. Our guest today is Motti Edelstein, VP, Chief Revenue Office at Sutter Health. In our conversation, Motti explains the importance of navigating regulatory landscapes, strengthening payer provider relationships and leveraging technology to transform the revenue cycle.

Ben Hilmes [00:00:49]:

Motti, thanks for joining the podcast today. It’s great to see you and I’m excited to about the dialogue. You recently made the move from Allina to Sutter, so that’s quite the move sort of geographically and certainly from a scale perspective, so curious to see how the first 90 days are going and kind of what you’re experiencing.

Motti Edelstein [00:01:11]:

I think one of the things that I like about healthcare and rev cycle is that those aren’t things that are really different. And so from a Lina Health perspective, really good people, really good leadership team, really good revenue cycle reorganization, re-engineering that we went through over the last four years, got there right at the beginning of COVID and had to redo a lot of the workflows to help them scale to the size and scope of the work that we needed done from an Allina Health perspective. And then coming to a place like Sutter, it’s a three, four times the size of Allina, however, same stuff. We’re still dealing with Blue Cross not paying blue card claims. We’re dealing with UnitedHealthcare sometimes, you know, denying for services that we really did get authorizations for. It’s all the same stuff, just a different name on the building. That’s the great part, right? I’ve got good people within the organization. We’ve got good partnerships with various entities that are helping us along the way in rep cycle. It’s interesting how close and similar these organizations are when it comes to their revenue cycle departments.

Ben Hilmes [00:02:25]:

Well, that’s probably good. I mean it helps you get off on a fast start, you hit the ground running kind of thing. I’m going to get back to the payer provider relationship in a minute, so keep that fresh, but I read an interview when you were back at the line in Becker’s and you talked a lot about regulations in the state of Minnesota and now you’re in California, probably the highest regulated state in, in the U.S. i’m curious to, for you to compare and contrast those and, and what you’re experiencing now that you’re in California.

Motti Edelstein [00:02:59]:

You’re right. I thought Minnesota would, would just take the cake. Everything we did was scrutinized by the governor, by the attorney general, by lots of regulatory state requirements on health care. And for a really good point, like there were health systems that unfortunately had problems in the past in the state of Minnesota. And because of those health systems, everybody was under scrutiny for a lot more than most. And then I got to California and wow. I mean there are more billing edits or pre bill edits to help with identifying all the various revenue cycle regulations that occur really just in the state, some of these things I’ve never seen and I’m learning, unfortunately the hard way is a lot of these come about because of bad behavior. No one wakes up one morning and says what is the most challenging way to force a health system to see a patient with no insurance? What’s the most challenging way to get a patient? The next available appointment in a priority metrics that’s based off of care, not based off of other needs or other issues. Because of that, the state of California has got a lot of regulations when it comes to healthcare and providing healthcare. And then therefore at the same time, how we code cases, how we bill, how we collect, who we speak to, what we do before a case. You know, in Minnesota, a lot of it came from bad behavior for patient billing. And in California, a lot of it came from, we’ll call it not such good behavior from the provider side as a whole, not just the patient billing side. And so there’s nuance to it. And you know, I think one of the great things that we rely on these days is the technology. And so we can rely on things like, you know, pre-bill edits or pre-service edits that force, you know, certain patient services into work queues.

Motti Edelstein [00:05:06]:

And it allows our staff to check on charity care, check on no insurance, check on Social Security, check on, you know, helping someone get Medicaid. All that type of work used to be manual. Now we rely on it a lot technology-wide, which helps with having to sort of juggle all these different regulations.

Ben Hilmes [00:05:27]:

I mean, you’re in Roseville, which just outside state capital of Sacramento. You guys flexing your muscle as one of the largest health systems in the state to try to influence some things. Do you guys spend a lot of time with legislators working through some of those challenges?

Motti Edelstein [00:05:43]:

Yeah, and I think so. It’s Interesting. Our corporate offices, sort of our C-suite, if you will, has really moved to Emeryville. Oh, and so I don’t think that’s by accident. I think that Warner Thomas came in as the new president. We’ve got Mark Sefco as the chief operating officer. The Bay Area is where the regulatory, you know, headquarters is for like Healthcare of California, not necessarily the state capital, right?

Ben Hilmes [00:06:14]:

Got it.

Motti Edelstein [00:06:14]:

Sacramento is where the base of operations were for the, you know, backbone of the health system, but I think all the larger health systems are located in or around the Bay. And because of that, Sutter now has a much stronger C-suite presence in that area as well. And that, I believe is allowing for much more than just dealing with the regulatory or the government side of California regulations. It’s also allowing for a lot more collaboration with other health systems and, or with payers that are in the area.

Ben Hilmes [00:06:49]:

That’s great. You mentioned payers. And when I was the chief integration officer there at Adventist Health there in Roseville, we were spending a great amount of time trying to figure out how do we strengthen, digitize the relationship with the payers. And I mean, it was just every turn, it was another challenge. Another challenge. It’s a necessary thing, that payer provider interaction and our ecosystem. Curious to see kind of your philosophy, how you think about that relationship with the payers and what you’re doing, you know, strengthen improve those interactions.

Motti Edelstein [00:07:27]:

So I’ll tell you, that’s also a specialty when it comes to California. Everyone has these agreements with the payers that at certain points in time it shouldn’t sort of like throw over these, you know, meet and confer type of, of arrangements. You’ve got to like, negotiate big settlements on old claims. One of the things I’m bringing to at least the Sutter health system, although now I’m recognizing that I’m helping to bring it to the payer side as well, who will probably then help with some of the other large health systems in the area. These concepts of like, don’t wait for two years to bring these bait problems to solve. Meet monthly on claims and operational issues. And so there has been, you know, I don’t want to say that there isn’t. There’s a lot of these joint operating committees that exist between Sutter Health and many of our payers.

Motti Edelstein [00:08:20]:

But I don’t know if the folks that have been involved have been at the level that have been able to say, okay, what was the root cause of, you know, these 30 cases that have been denied for no loss. They’re all Inpatient services and you payer have access to our medical records. You payer received the records and should have made a medical necessity determination like at day one, not at day 170 after discharge and after the bill was paid. And now you’re doing a post pay review or not after the discharge. In general, like the process should work better, so I’m implementing a lot of these monthly touch phases with the payers to actually review case by case. What I like doing and I’m going to continue doing is like, we’ll bring up Epic side by side with the payer system. And so if, you know, UnitedHealthcare is easy to use as an example, if I bring up Epic, and in Epic I can show, you know, here’s my touchpoint of notifying the payer of when the patient was admitted.

Motti Edelstein [00:09:21]:

Here’s my touchpoint of providing clinicals and documentation to the payer. All those steps. I know on the United side they’re doing the same thing, right? So working with some of these payers long enough, like, you know, the systems, the smaller, you know, payers may not have the sophistication, but you know, the big ones do. And so when we’re staying, you know, on December 23rd, a patient was admitted and we provided clinicals on December 23rd via whatever vehicle we used to get the information there. And we completed whatever questions and whatever emails that went back and forth between the UM and case management nurses. By December 24, someone should be telling me whether or not they agree, not January 20th or June 20th. And so we’re starting to go through that monthly process with some of the payers and it’s really bringing up some of these key issues that are not new to Sutter, but some of it is stutter changes I think to happen and some of it is payer behavior changes, but operationally we can fix these things throughout the course of time, not wait for, you know, a thousand claims worth $50 million that need to be, you know, settled on or negotiated or sued.

Ben Hilmes [00:10:34]:

So the operational rigor, I mean that while I appreciate that that’s something you’re having to do, are you finding through that monthly process identifying things that you might be able to automate or that you can get agreement on with the payer that we don’t have to continue to just beat this thing with operational rigor, we can actually advance something from a transformational standpoint.

Motti Edelstein [00:10:59]:

Absolutely. One of the key items is, you know, sutterlink to allow payers to have access to medical records. I think another thing is to push the Epic Payer Platform. I think that’s a big one, is that we’re not using that enough. Epic Payer Platform is potentially something that’ll be a game changer for us as far as sharing information with payers. We’re not exactly sure where that information is stored yet on the payer side because what we’re seeing is, is some payers are quick to say, yeah, great, thank you very much for sharing that, but when I’m trying to appeal a denial, there’s asking for medical record for the same medical record, right? It’s because those two departments aren’t yet talking to each other, so there’s a ways to go.

Motti Edelstein [00:11:41]:

But I think that’s. That that would be a perfect example of like we have technology, you know, for the most part most of us are on either Epic or something similar to if a payer needs information, I should either allow them access to it right away, have a mechanism of sharing with them electronically, not factors tax it like I’m doing today to so many payers. They should be able to either store that information or at least store the information relevant so that the people who are then processing claims aren’t asking for the same information for sure.

Ben Hilmes [00:12:16]:

And you know, I mean it’s interesting because there’s all this operational waste, if you would, in the middle there. And obviously this translates to somebody on the other end, I. E. The patient that has inexperience against it, so I know you have committed a lot of your time in the past and now around focusing on that experience. Help me understand what you’re doing as you try to balance all of that payer provider space and then how that translates to a great experience for your patients.

Motti Edelstein [00:12:50]:

This is like probably new over the last four or five years where the patient experience at the center of everything has become like the reminder, sometimes you remind some clinicians and they get all upset at you. Like of course the patients have the experience. What do you mean? When we’re doing things like pre op work and we’re doing things where we’re trying to integrate patient access, utilization review with the clinicians who are ordering services, ordering tests, and we’re trying to avoid denials and write offs, a lot of it centers around getting the claim paid, we’re getting the service completed and because of that we’re very focused on creating work queues and work lists for our teams to be able to accomplish those tasks. And here I come and I keep on saying king as we’re reviewing these claims and I’m like Okay. If you were the patient, would you understand the complexities of what we created to get this patient in for let’s say an MRI or let’s say a surgical procedure? Right. The patient doesn’t understand that we have all these checklists that we’re trying to check in order to ultimately provide the care and get paid for the care, but they’re not included in that mix. And if they knew all of it, they would probably help.

Motti Edelstein [00:14:08]:

I have a great example and I use this example pretty often. A non participating provider that sends a patient for a high dollar radiology, right. That service is going to get denied or paid at a lower level and leave the patient with a higher out of pocket, even though the hospital is participating and it’s got nothing to do with us, so the hospital could participate with the insurance plan. And by the way, it’s no longer the payer level. Every one of our payers now has so many plan offerings at like the employer level that there’s so many nuances. And in California, it takes it down to the IPA level. I mean, every group of whatever basically has their own agreement with a payer in order to provide services at a provider location.

Motti Edelstein [00:15:00]:

And so it just takes it down so many notches that there’s so many complexities on what is really the goal. The goal is to provide the service for the patient. And so we need to build more rule sets to tell the patient and or the referring provider, please have the patient get this referral for, let’s say, an MRI from a participating provider of UnitedHealthcare, because they need on health care instead of being a patient with a $50 copay, right? You know, now it’s like they’re left with like $750 out of network, whatever, right? There’s no reason to pay that amount of money. It’s just, it’s taking that level back of saying in every step of the way, you got to put the patient at the center and recognize what does that mean? Because in essence, if you didn’t care, okay, so you provide the service, you got your authorization, you got your referral, the referring provider gets the scan, the patient may or may not need surgery or whatever else as far as continuation of care, but now they’re left with this big out of pocket. They’re all up in arms when they get the bill. They don’t understand why, and no one really did everything wrong.

Motti Edelstein [00:16:10]:

But in starting to change that viewpoint of putting the patient at the center of every decision we make and every workflow we create, it is Changing the way we provide care. And so basically, that’s a lot of learning that I did in Minnesota with Allina Health because of some of the challenges that we have there with state regulations and with being able to help the patient along through their journey. From a financial perspective, to a lot of people coining the term like not being financially in debt for health care and healthcare debt and healthcare financial toxicity and all these, you know, words that people are using, at the end of the day, it’s really a matter of taking a step back and saying, okay, what could we have done differently that this patient would not have been left with either a high bill or such challenge to get their care? And that’s something that Sutter Health is putting at the forefront. Like, that’s something that they are investing in, invested in to make sure that patients are at the center. From a rev cycle perspective, from a finance department perspective, most people never thought of it that way. And I think now more and more we’re starting to think of it that way and create our workflows because of it.

Ben Hilmes [00:17:26]:

Well, I mean, it’s getting more and more complex. Like you talked about all the plan levels, even at the employer level. And so that kind of leads me into, you know, technology. Like, I believe revenue cycle in healthcare is one of the more ripe areas for just complete digital transformation. I mean, we have the capabilities that the complexities are growing. We should be leveraging more technology to help manage through the complexity, simplify the process, et cetera. What’s your view on that? I mean, technology for technology’s sake doesn’t make sense, but when you can use it to simplify, improve an experience, improve overall performance, efficiencies, outcomes, et cetera, it shocks me.

Ben Hilmes [00:18:09]:

We don’t lean into that old adage is just throw more people at it. We don’t have more people to throw at it, so we’ve got to think differently as we continue to move forward. And I think rev cycle is an area that I think in the short term and long term is just really, really ripe for digital transformation.

Motti Edelstein [00:18:27]:

I could not agree with you more, sometimes I say things and I gotta be careful because, like, all the CFOs in the world are gonna be upset with what I say, right? I’m gonna give a piece of muti reality. I’m not saying that this is every CFO of every health system, but for the most part, revenue cycle is not a place that most CFOs get awards for spending money, right? And so when they’re fighting budgets and fighting different Commitments and different priorities. Obviously, in a health system, most CFOs, when they’re the ones who are trying to say, okay, listen, this is what we have enough money for, everything goes for patient care. And so if I stand up and say I need a piece of technology, and I’ll give you a good example, right, the technology exists today that we should be able to automate charity care, which means for every patient that needs charity care, I shouldn’t need an army of people reviewing, do they have Medicaid? Do they have insurance? Do they not have insurance? How much do they make? What’s their credit score is like, what is their propensity to pay all those things, right? Because it’s all available in so many systems these days and yet no one’s collaborated to create all of that and make it cheap. And so instead when I’m up against a project like that, I’m up against like, there’s a new robot that is able to do like heart transplants in babies that are still in utero. Well, guess who wins? It’s not Motti, it’s not rep cycle. It’s always going to be the clinical forefront.

Motti Edelstein [00:20:01]:

And so, yeah, rev cycle is at like a stage where everything we do is focused on how many people do you need to, you know, capture the charge, register patients, code, bill, follow up. All that stuff could be automated, right? Nobody goes to the airline and checks in at the counter and buys a new ticket. It’s almost unheard of, right? You do that if it’s like an emergency or a last minute trip. Almost everyone is doing all of that before they even leave their house. And for the most part, it’s a month before, within 24 hours of them showing up to the airport, they’re checking in on their iPhone or their digital whatever or their computer. Why do I need somebody standing at every front desk of every clinic to say, oh, you’re here. What’s your last name? Let me click a button that says that you’re here. Oh, and by the way, you have a $20 copay, right? And here’s a clipboard for you to fill out some information that I know you filled out an hour ago at the primary care doctor, but they sent you for some specialty services.

We’re going to have you fill out again. And oh, by the way, and there’s a $25 copay. And now I have a person at a front desk who is literally just like doing paperwork that the patient could have totally done from their digital experience however they wanted to beforehand, so we’re not there yet. I don’t think we’re there yet at the Society for Healthcare because there are certain places people want it and then there are certain places when we change it. If you remember five, ten years ago, everybody put these kiosks up, everyone loved it. And then like two years later, everyone’s complaining that we took away the personal part of showing up to the clinics and to the doctor’s offices and to the, you know, radiology centers. And here I am saying, wait, we could have automated all that.

I could have saved all that money and the money could have gone into better use, but instead we had to bring people back because patients were complaining that they didn’t feel as if they had a person at the front desk to help them get in, so, yeah, we’re right for that type of stuff.

Ben Hilmes [00:22:06]:

Yeah, I mean, I’m getting pretty good at checking myself out at the grocery store and other retailers, et cetera. What’s the tipping point, though? I mean, it’s like, let’s get on with it. It’s frustrating. I’m sure every day for you to see all the things that, you know, can be fixed through automation or some kind of digital transformation. All the buzz around AI. I know AI’s been around a long time, but, you know, we’re starting to see a lot more visibility to AI being applied to healthcare is revenue cycle. I mean, what are you doing to take advantage of some of the. The new buzz and are you leveraging that to help drive change?

Motti Edelstein [00:22:47]:

So I think I’m going to answer that in two parts, one part, which, again, these things get me into trouble, so hopefully nobody’s taking this too seriously, but it’s, it’s meant to be a mechanism to partner better, right? A lot of us that are an Epic rely on Epic to sort of be at the forefront, because Epic’s a very expensive piece of system and, like, we’re not going to spend extra money on some third party if, you know, we think Epic is going to come up with something. Right? And up until a few years ago, Epic was never at the forefront. They were always playing catch up, right? So they may have been at the forefront on the clinical side, but for the most part, all these third parties would come up with these intuitive and automated processes, but you needed to bolt on a third party and then they’d have to get Epic licensing and it was like a hole to do. And then two years later, after you spent all this money with this third party, Epic would catch up.

Motti Edelstein [00:23:43]:

And for the most part, that’s been like Epic’s MO at least in my experience, for rev cycle. And I apologize to anybody from Epic. Juni, I am not knocking Epic. We do not. You know, that’s not what this is about.

Ben Hilmes [00:23:54]:

On the record, I can tell you I was in Verona earlier this year. It’s absolutely phenomenal and amazing, their roadmap and that the pace at which they’re, you know, pushing the envelope here, it’s. It’s pretty fascinating. It’s great to see. And they know that most of their clients are thinking Epic first, right? So if Epic can do it, I’m going to wait. And so they’re working at.

Ben Hilmes [00:24:16]:

At a very rapid pace. I think the challenges we’re seeing in the client space is adoption, so they’ve got capabilities, but how do I, as an organization, put a plan together to take on that, those new capabilities? It’s not just turning it on. It’s implementing. It’s change management, it’s education, it’s all these things, so, you know, we’re spending a fair amount of time in that space trying to help accelerate, you know, some, some drive to value.

Motti Edelstein [00:24:45]:

Okay, so you brought up number two, right? My number one was sort of saying, you know, we rely on Epic, and if Epic doesn’t come to us with it, we have to use these third parties. My number two answer to that is we’re not set up for this stuff. Our processes and our systems. We set it up to replace, for the most part, going to a doctor’s office, having a paper chart which then turned electronic, having a paper bill, which then turned electronic, and building the entire infrastructure for what was, what we’ll call, let’s say, 30 years ago, right? 20 years ago, 15 years ago, we did a lot of updates to the technology.

Motti Edelstein [00:25:24]:

Unless you recently implemented an Epic or a Meditech or, you know, some new system or Cerner, like all of the old systems were not built to be able to do this, like plug and play, you know, who’s got the latest technology for me to not have to do authorizations manually? Right. There’s a lot of companies out there that are basically saying, give us your file will ping the payer. They’ll give us back information, we’ll get back eligibility, and who needs an authorization or referral. And then the computer itself will do it for you. We’ll automate that process. Well, that’s very nice, but unless you set up your system that way, it’s almost impossible to do something as simple as. And again, I’ll go back to Epic, right?

Motti Edelstein [00:26:07]:

The Payer Plan categories within Epic, right? If, if you don’t have that set up right, in order to ping the payer or pin a third party correctly and ingest all that information back in, the first piece you got to do is go back and rebuild your Epic, which by the way, almost every big health system is doing because Epic is coming, as you just mentioned, they’ve got this like huge list now because instead of playing catch up over the past few years, they’ve now like on super speed, have come to market with all these new things, but in order to take all of that and ingest it into your version of Epic, you’ve got to get caught up. Literally. That’s what we’re working on. It’s how do we catch up to be able to start ingesting Epic inherent new technology to allow us to work faster. They’ve got automation and machine learning and all that and it’s all nice, but most health systems out there aren’t capable of taking it in until we undo some of the things that we did. And on behalf of ref cycle, I’ll say a lot of it was we in different markets needed different things and so we said, okay, well for this hospital I need this mapping and for this hospital I need this different stuff and this hospital has a different, you know, medical record bolt on system.

Motti Edelstein [00:27:24]:

So I need different rule sets. Now what we’re learning is if we want the best of Epic or the best of even any third party, who’s going to bring more technology, we’ve gotten more aligned across the board. It’s like back to basics, you know, like, how do I get to an original form and I’ll use again. I’m using Epic now as, as the example because it’s the biggest and it’s the one I’m working on. Like how do you get to a Epic platform that it will allow you to install all their new stuff when you know you first have to uninstall all the stuff that you made for yourself in order for it to work.

Ben Hilmes [00:28:03]:

You’re using it as an example, but it’s not clearly not unique to just Epic, right? Oracle Health, right, is launching their new Oracle Health Patient Accounting, formerly known as Revelate. And the bulk of the work is around the readiness, then the overall adoption, training, et cetera, so it’s not unique to just Epic, it’s any of the key EMR players as they’re advancing their rep cycle capabilities. The good thing is we are seeing progress, but I think there’s a lot of work A lot of transformation in the rep cycle space in, you know, the years to come for sure.

Motti Edelstein [00:28:37]:

Well, they’re not letting us customize the way we used to, right? If you go to any of these new systems, if you do any new install with anyone, they’re basically giving you a box and saying like, other than these parameters, you can’t make those changes anymore because if you do, we can’t continue updating you. In the past, we would totally rip apart what they would recommend. And then when they say, oh, you want to automate these three, these three pieces? No problem. Here, take this update. And we’re all like, wait, we can’t. When we test it, it all fails.

Motti Edelstein [00:29:09]:

Well, of course it all fails because we built all these, you know, nuances that we thought were so special for us. The reality is health systems now are figuring out, stop customizing and start figuring out how to, how to be much more enterprise oriented. And when that happens, you’re able to do the bolt ons and things like that from Epic or from any system much easier.

Ben Hilmes [00:29:32]:

Hey, I want to bring it kind of in for a landing here. We always talk about leadership of some sort in, in the pods. And you know, you travel between your home in the Midwest and California, but one of the things you’ve always done is coffee with Mahdi, talk about what that is and how you utilize that with your teams. That’s an interesting concept and something I may steal shamelessly.

Motti Edelstein [00:29:56]:

What I learned from, and this is probably back like when I was, when I was a director of a cbo, right? Of a central business, business office. And you’ve got hundreds of people in cubicles across large amounts of space. People need a forum to just talk. People need a forum to converse, to have ideas, to create a network, to create a community. And the forum doesn’t need and shouldn’t have an agenda, right? We have town halls for agendas. We have weekly and monthly operating reviews. Those have agendas. I needed something where people were just willing to have conversation.

Motti Edelstein [00:30:37]:

And some of it was like time based. Like people needed a safe space to talk. And during COVID we needed plenty of that. Being at a line in Minnesota with George Floyd, we needed even more of that. Like, people needed a safe space to be able to converse, but nobody was in an office, right? We were thousands of people in different locations, many of us working from home and we needed to connect. And so the coffee with Motti allows people once a month, usually for 30 minutes, sometimes for 60. Where I’m available and anybody can dial in it is not officially downtime from their work, so they have to actually be on lunch break or take a break from their time.

Motti Edelstein [00:31:23]:

Then I get into like union issues and I get into people who track productivity issues. Like, I had to be careful with how we set this up, so I said, you know what, we will do this like as lunch break, so if you want to join, it’s on you to join and anyone’s invited. Very often I’ll rotate between like morning, middle of day and evening so that I get different shifts so that people can join depending on, because I’ve got people that work for me 24, 7. This way people can join whatever’s okay for them. And it replaced the ability to be in a single office where there’s a whole bunch of people who.

Motti Edelstein [00:31:57]:

When I would walk around, you know, one of the things I used to do was say good morning and hello to every single person that worked for me, right? I would walk up and down all the cubicles every single day. People would say hello. People would stop me for questions. People would ask like, what’s the strategy of these things? What are we doing? And then some people would be like, you know, I had a flat tire this morning, where should I get replaced? You don’t realize that when folks are coming and are part of this community that we call work, we’re more than just this like hierarchy of supervisor, manager, director, right? Like, it’s a lot more than that. We’re a group of people where people rely on each other for like day to day help. If someone on their way to work has a flat tire and they don’t have a person to call, my expectation is that they call their supervisor. I teach that within revenue cycle. Because the supervisor role, the one up role, is a lot more than just like, did you do your work today? Did you do it correctly today? Did you log in? Did you call out sick? They need to be involved.

Motti Edelstein [00:33:00]:

They’re part of each other’s networks. And so I think it’s important for people to create that network. And this coffee with Motti is like a curtains down. You know, ask anything. And there are times where we chat about like, how many open cereals do you have in your cupboard at any point in time? You know, growing up, we were only allowed to open one box of cereal, but we were four kids and four kids, like the different cereals, you know, I have four kids and at any given time I have like 15 boxes of cereal open and I’m like, they’re going bad. What’s going on? But It’s a good topic because people want to just talk, people want to hang, people want to be a part of something. And then other times it’s like, hey, guys, like, we just wrote off $5 million of no off services for MRI. Like, what are we doing about this? How can we change it? What can we do better? And people come up with great ideas, right? And so sometimes you just need that forum.

Motti Edelstein [00:33:49]:

And so coffee with Motti has been amazing.

Ben Hilmes [00:33:51]:

Well that’s awesome. I, I think, you know, it sounds like a simple concept, but it’s not easy to do, so I would commend you on creating that environment where people feel safe, they feel like they can open up on a myriad of topics, whether it’s personal, professional, etc, and you know, I do find when you create that tighter community association, that you’re not just, you know, an employee, that you’re an associate and, and you care about them as humans. You’re going to win in life and you’re going to win at work, and that’s a, that’s a really, really good thing, but Marty, this has been great. We should do this again because I think there’s 20 more things we could talk about and I’d love to get your perspective on. Maybe we’ll give it, you know, some months here as you get more sunk into the role, but we’d love to continue the dialogue, but really, really appreciate you coming on the podcast and look forward to many more conversations.

Motti Edelstein [00:34:47]:

Likewise. Thanks, Ben. My pleasure. Anytime.

Ben Hilmes [00:34:50]:

You bet.

Ben Hilmes [00:34:54]:

Motti really understands the revenue cycle and has had an incredible career. Here are a few takeaways from our conversation. 1. Motti and his team meet monthly with payers. They use data to fight back against denials and they try to prevent small issues from becoming big ones. 2. Revenue cycle technology is advancing, but the rapid pace of change is creating its own set of challenges for health systems. 3. Motti is a big believer in open communication. His regular coffee hour with the staff is a safe space for dialogue and information sharing, so what did you think? What were your big takeaways from the episode? I’d love to hear from you on our social media channels or drop me an email from our website@healthcareitleaders.com.

Narrator [00:35:42]:

Thanks for joining us for Leader to Leader. To learn more about how to fuel your own personal leadership journey through the healthcare industry, visit healthcareitleaders.com. don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss any insights, and we’ll see you on the next episode.