Systemware’s Gordon Sellers to Help Lead Healthcare Workshop at IFO’s Annual Fusion Conference

by Gordon Sellers on May 17, 2013

I’m scheduled to be in Orlando next week helping to lead a healthcare workshop being held as part of the Institute of Financial Operations’ annual Fusion conference.

In the five-hour session I’ll be alongside Mark Brousseau, president of Brousseau & Associates in York, Pa.  Our workshop will be held May 23 along with others on Capture, Retail, Leadership, Brand Strategy, and Foundations and Nonprofits. Fusion runs May 19-23 at Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort.

The focus of our one-day roundtable will be AP/AR issues affecting healthcare providers, and it will span both automation and process best practices for the hospitals’ traditional AR/AP.  It also will include topics and discussion around the management and automation of the revenue cycle for health services billing and payments.

At Systemware, I’m responsible for overseeing our healthcare ECM and medical banking solutions as well as directing efforts in digital delivery.  I speak fairly often at conferences, including at last year’s Fusion event and more recently at January’s Healthcare Payments Innovations conference, where I talked about EOB conversion.

Mark Broussaeu is a marketer, analyst, speaker, and writer with more than 20 years of experience advising providers of payments and document automation solutions. Brousseau & Associates boasts the largest client base of any independent marketing firm specializing in the payments and document automation arenas.

Fusion is billed as the premier training event for financial operations professionals, and includes breakout sessions, thought-leader sessions, keynotes, and networking opportunities covering the full spectrum of financial operations, including accounts payable, accounts receivable, information management, and data capture.

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Enhancing the Mainframe with Content Storage Solutions

by Frankie Basso on May 16, 2013

With all the talk of cloud computing, IT rationlization and re-platforming, it can be tempting to forget that the mainframe remains a powerful component of corporate infrastructure. And while it’s not without its challenges, the mainframe is a proven technology with unmatched processing power. It’s also one in which corporations worldwide have invested heavily. So for those of us in enterprise content management, the question isn’t if the mainframe is being replaced; rather it’s how the mainframe can be enhanced.

The essential nature of the mainframe is confirmed annually in a survey of mainframe users worldwide. In the most recent survey, 90 percent of respondents said they consider the mainframe to be a long-term business solution. Half said they think it will attract new workloads.

“This survey just stands to remind us that we really don’t change that quickly or easily and sometimes the old tried-and-true methods do work better, particularly if they can be advanced to embrace new concepts and ideas,” Rob Enderle commented in ITBusinessEdge. “For major initiatives like cloud computing and software as a service, the transactional advantages that mainframes have may keep them around longer than we are.” Another commentator has proclaimed, “The mainframe is the eternal computing platform.”

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In Healthcare Billing, It’s All About Reconciliation

by Gordon Sellers on May 7, 2013

Electronic processing speeds and simplifies so many transactions that its problem-solving potential seems unlimited. Then there’s the world of healthcare remittance advice. The systems, standards and processes currently in place at healthcare payers’ companies are so profoundly behind those of other industries. Depending on the provider, payers will send combinations of paper and/or electronic remittances (EDI 835) and payments. For example, a provider might receive paper EOBs with an ACH payment or EDI 835 with a check. The forms of the remittances and payments are really up to the payer and their preferred method of interaction with each provider. That’s where medical banking comes in.

“The world of billing problems is as vast as medicine itself,” Cleveland’s Plain-Dealer newspaper declared in a May 2012 story in which it told readers it would devote a year to examining the problem. The next month, The Plain-Dealer published a story saying that nearly 300 people can play a part in creating a hospital bill before, during and after the stay. “Then there are people at insurance companies who decide if your treatment is covered, hospital billing employees who review charges and, in many cases, collections workers whose job is to make sure you pay. The opportunities for mistakes are astronomical,” the paper said.

Real issue is reconciliation

Actually, the problem here goes beyond paper, paper and data conversion, as well as data normalization. Because payers send a single payment for a batch of patient bills, healthcare providers have difficulty reconciling their payment data with their specific patient billing records. So even if you get rid of the paper, you still have a much bigger issue: reconciliation.

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A Novel Approach to Information Silos

by Kendall Brown on April 26, 2013

No one says he or she wants to create an information silo. “Yeah, I don’t want anyone else to have access to my information. I don’t want it to be used by my colleagues or leveraged in the improvement of my business. And I want to make sure I’m creating duplicates that will waste time and money.” Yet information silos still exist decades after it was acknowledged by most everyone in enterprise content management they are bad for business. Why is that? And what can be done about it?

One of the most obvious reasons for information silos is choice. Plenty of corporations are unwilling to give up legacy systems, so they merely park their new systems next to the older ones. Many organizations prefer to diversify their vendor base so they can compare services and stay flexible.  Mergers and acquisitions are another contributor.

The ECM industry, meanwhile, continues to create more and more ways to capture, manage, store and access information. Sometimes its collaboration and information-sharing tools end up adding layers of complexity. As information volumes grow and compliance pressures increase, corporations are under mounting pressure to store content in the most efficient way possible, so, again, a variety of systems get employed. Inside corporations, each department looks for a system or systems that can be tailored to their own needs.

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What Digital Delivery Means to Us

by Gordon Sellers on April 19, 2013

These days it seems like everyone’s talking about digital delivery. Use the term in a Google search and you’ll get more than 700 million results. And clearly digital delivery means different things to different people. Let’s look at a few examples and review what digital delivery means to Systemware.

Organizations ranging from banking and financial services firms to media to government are looking for new channels to deliver content to consumers. While many of those corporations are focused on mobile devices, for instance, plenty of others are broadening the definition of digital delivery to include initiatives that have relevance in enterprise content management.

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Five Keys for Selecting a New ECM Solution

by Kendall Brown on April 12, 2013

Image for ECM Solution BlogIn considering converting to a new enterprise content management solution, many corporations are looking for the latest features, while others are engaged in mainframe optimization or are seeking capabilities in excess of those that their legacy solutions provide. When moving from one content repository to another, there are several key objectives to keep in mind.

1. Create an integrated strategy for the capture, storage, management and delivery of content. The most effective ECM solutions provide the capabilities to capture, index, store, and manage all structured and unstructured content, including paper documents, desktop files, print streams, images, email, XML – virtually any electronic content.  Additionally, the best solutions can be successfully integrated with existing systems so that organizations can continue to take advantage of their strengths.

2. Establish standards for content creation, storage, workflow, publication and security. Many organizations require a real-time platform for managing documents and content to meet regulatory and compliance requirements while also integrating with core applications. They need to grant access rights, permissions and functions using role-based security, as well as maintain a log of user access and activity. Ideally, user authentication can occur either within the ECM solution or in conjunction with the existing network permissions and access infrastructure.

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Migration from Mainframes Opens the Way for New Approaches

April 5, 2013

As the mainframe computer looks at life after 50, its defenders and detractors seem locked in a war of words about how gracefully it’s aging. But there is no debating the fact that with money tight and data demands increasing, Information Technology departments are looking for efficiencies. More than a few are engaged in full-scale [...]

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Report Highlights Value of Digital Delivery

March 28, 2013

A recent report from the research analysis firm TowerGroup has a familiar ring when it comes to digital delivery. “Insurance: Top 10 Technology Initiatives for 2013” not surprisingly includes a call for more attention to analytics and tools to take advantage of Big Data. But it also includes recommendations to “embed agile communications” and “integrate [...]

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AIIM Conference Highlights the ‘Revolutionary Imperative’ of Big Content

March 22, 2013

“Extreme Information: Volume, Variety, Devices,” the title of the AIIM Conference going on this week in New Orleans, should leave no doubt as to what the Association of Information and Image Management thinks about the direction of enterprise content management. AIIM said the conference featuring Seth Godin, futurist Thornton May, Forrester analyst Cheryl McKinnon and [...]

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Case Study: Systemware Helps Bank Improve Online Security, Statement Access and Customer Satisfaction

March 13, 2013

A billion-dollar community bank chose Systemware to provide it with immediate access to critical business information across the enterprise, such as customer statements, customer records, account records, and reports. The resulting success led to even deeper collaborations as the bank has expanded its use of Systemware enterprise content management technologies. This bank’s online strategy had [...]

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