60% of hospitals and health systems that adopt lean principles also use automation; larger organizations report highest use of automation efforts

September 9, 2021 — South San Francisco, Calif. — AKASA™, the only Unified Automation™ company for healthcare revenue cycle management, released findings from a new survey, highlighting how hospitals and health systems that embrace lean principles also often include automation as a strategy to achieve success. Nearly 70% of hospitals and health systems reported using lean principles for business process improvement and more than 60% of those respondents also say they employ automation within the revenue cycle to reduce waste and improve efficiency.

“We are seeing that for organizations actively employing lean management principles, leaders quickly recognize the value of automation within the revenue cycle and conversion to automation happens swiftly — especially for larger organizations with more overhead,” said Amy Raymond, head of revenue cycle operations at AKASA. “Revenue cycle automation reduces variation and increases productivity — key tenets within the lean principles. Automation can also serve to expand revenue capture, accelerate cash collections, improve clean claims rates, increase first pass-payments and decrease the overall cost to collect.”

Commissioned by AKASA, the survey fielded responses from nearly 400 chief financial officers and revenue cycle leaders at hospitals and health systems across the United States through the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s (HFMA) Pulse Survey program between May 27, 2021 and June 28, 2021. The national survey was designed to assess the adoption of automation in revenue cycle operations at hospitals and health systems across the U.S.

Survey respondents were asked, “Does your organization use lean principles for business process improvement?”

Is your use of automation in revenue cycle operations part of a larger, lean process-improvement effort?

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Does your organization use lean principles for business process improvement?

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Use of lean principles broken down by healthcare system size (based on net patient revenue)

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Use of lean principles and automation in revenue cycle broken down by size of healthcare system (based on net patient revenue)

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About AKASA

At AKASA, we believe every dollar spent on healthcare matters because healthcare matters to everyone. The only Unified Automation™ company for healthcare, AKASA uses the same machine learning approaches that made driverless cars possible to provide health systems with a single solution for automating revenue cycle operations. AKASA’s unique expert-in-the-loop approach, Unified Automation, combines modern machine-learning with human judgment and subject matter expertise to provide robust and resilient automation. Unified Automation™ adapts to the highly dynamic nature of revenue cycle operations and has been purpose-built for healthcare. AKASA enables health systems to decrease their cost to collect so they can invest more in patient care and be better stewards of the healthcare dollar. AKASA is based in the heart of Silicon Valley. Learn more at www.AKASA.com.