A prominent Mid-Atlantic academic health system partnered with Access Healthcare to support the consolidation of four legacy platforms into Epic, a transformation that quickly exposed significant revenue cycle challenges. Coding volumes grew faster than internal capacity could absorb; accuracy fell below 90 percent, and more than 30 percent of weekly charges sat unbilled. Inpatient claims took an average of seven days from discharge to billing. Outpatient unbilled balances climbed past $6 million. Missed revenue capture exceeded $14 million per month.
The problem: Growth had outpaced the infrastructure holding it together.
Access Healthcare teamed up with the system to perform an operational assessment to pinpoint exactly where breakdowns were occurring across inpatient and outpatient coding workflows. Rather than waiting for the full Epic rollout to stabilize, Access Healthcare immediately deployed experienced Epic coders into live facilities while simultaneously providing targeted support to hospitals still running on legacy systems. Access Healthcare’s CDI specialists worked directly with physicians, using structured query templates to improve documentation quality at the point of care. Concurrent and retrospective audits ran throughout the engagement to protect accuracy gains as volume scaled.
Coding accuracy surpassed 95 percent, reducing errors and closing revenue leakage. Additionally, weekly unbilled charges dropped below 10 percent across inpatient and outpatient workflows. The outpatient unbilled balance fell from more than $6 million to under $3 million. Inpatient claims in the Epic work queue cleared within two days instead of seven.
Access Healthcare extended the academic health system’s team capacity at the exact points where operational gaps were creating financial exposure, then scaled as the system stabilized. A customized targeted engagement model built around what the AMC needed.
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