Your strategies for improving patient registration processes.

Julie Johnson: Communication is our number one strategy. Our patient accounting team meets quarterly to identify and communicate the top 10 list of denials. Once we’ve identified critical bill stoppers, we set up specific edits that are automatically generated. Also, we set accuracy goals by facility and registrar longevity. In addition, we link our registration accuracy to patient safety, because we believe registration needs to be integrated into our organizational strategic planning to meet our goals for the Joint Commission and other national patient safety initiatives. The vigilance of our registrars can make an important difference in the quality of patient care. For example, they can pull forward a past history of allergies in medical records or identify duplicate or fragmented medical records. I believe that financial managers need to better emphasize to front-end employees how important their work is in ensuring patients receive high-quality care.