Healthcare providers’ finances may be looking more stable in 2024 than they have in recent years, but these organizations are still under a significant amount of pressure from ever-increasing costs, particularly for labor and drugs. From June 2023 to June 2024, providers’ overall expenses rose by nearly 5%.
To battle this unrelenting problem, providers must focus on closing financial gaps. Last week, WebMD Ignite unveiled new products aimed at helping providers fill these gaps by targeting a specific problem: revenue leakage.
WebMD Ignite is the company’s division that offers tech solutions to providers and health plans, mainly designed to help them better engage with their patients and members. Through its new products, the company is giving its customers specific tools to grow their referral volume and learn more about their market’s provider referral pattern.
“Leakage is a major challenge. The financial incentives are significant given the opportunity to claim what should be captive revenue. Organizational success really does come down to patient acquisition through healthcare providers and their referrals,” David Bell, WebMD Ignite’s senior vice president of growth and operations, said in a statement.
If a provider fails to fully understand the dynamics of their market and its provider landscape, then their go-to-market efforts may be mistargeted and ineffective, he added.
Bell noted that WedMD’s new tools give healthcare organizations “a birds-eye view” of provider activity and market share data — which is valuable when coming up with targeted patient growth strategies. He also pointed out that the company’s tools use claims data to identify specific National Provider Identifiers (NPIs) who have been referring their patients to certain service lines at a high rate over the past 18 months.
“In addition to historic referral data, we also consider a range of factors, such as the provider’s geographic location and their specialty group, to score each individual NPI in the claims data. This allows us to model the top percentile of NPIs likely to refer to each specialty/service by market. From this, we can export a target list of all healthcare providers with a high referral propensity to improve provider relationships and increase patient visits,” he explained.
WebMD Ignite declined to name its health system customers, but the company said it works with “95% of the top 40 largest health systems” in the U.S.
Other companies that sell technology aimed at improving providers’ referral growth include ReferralMD, Redox and Phreesia.
Photo: erhui1979, Getty Images
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