About South Eastern Laboratory Services (SEALS)
SEALS is a part of NSW Health Pathology, delivering laboratory medicine services to all public hospitals serviced by the South Eastern Sydney Local Health District and the Illawarra Shoalhaven Local Health District. SEALS also provides a comprehensive referral service to other hospitals, laboratories and community-based Medical Practitioners.
SEALS is focused on delivering comprehensive, high quality diagnostic and clinical services to state, national and international reference laboratories and has a strong reputation for working collaboratively with clinicians and other institutions to foster relevant research and best practice diagnosis.
The challenge
With outstanding debtors of over $7.1 million, SEALS established a revenue team in April 2014 to address this issue by focusing solely on billing and debt recovery.
Whilst the team was very focused and hardworking, most were inexperienced with large-scale billing and debt recovery. While there was an existing billing software system in place, it was limited in its capability and complex for the debt recovery team to use.
The limitations of the system, the volume of debtors, the inexperience of the team, combined with the time being spent on printing invoices, fixing numerous errors, and then reprinting invoices prior to despatching the team were unable to reduce the outstanding debtors.
Beamtree solution
SEALS leveraged Beamtrees’ RippleDown Auditor solution to automate the identification and resolution of errors in real-time. The RippleDown solution was able to integrate with SEALS’ existing LIS which enabled information to be quickly captured and analysed from multiple sources and then reported to the relevant administrative staff for action.
With real-time flagging and reporting, RippleDown was able to generate alerts for billing and insurance eligibility. This meant that hospitals and collection centres could be immediately notified of patient billings, outstanding invoices, or missing information, at the time the patient presented themselves. This capability had an immediate and significant impact on the outstanding debtors.
RippleDown also enabled the team to identify and fix a variety of errors in the post-invoice generation process. Furthermore, with all actions and cases being audited in real-time, management was able to quickly and easily identify where mistakes were being made. According to management, this enabled the accuracy of the team increased significantly.
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