Sandy Lood is vice president, revenue cycle, at Cottage Health, a health system based in Santa Barbara, California. Kodiak Solutions recognized Cottage Health with its 2023 Revenue Cycle Performance Award, presented at Kodiak’s 2024 Healthcare Virtual Symposium.

Please meet one of the many people behind the performance.

Age

43

Tenure with organization

Five years

Reports to

CFO

Number of direct reports

Eight

Number of care sites reporting revenue

23

Annual revenue cycle budget

$31 million

Number of revenue cycle FTEs

248.6

Work modality

Hybrid in-person and work from home

Patient accounting system

Epic

Number of revenue cycle vendors

29

Fully outsources revenue cycle or in-house revenue cycle team

In-house

Cross-department relationships

Not applicable

Biggest external revenue cycle challenge

Payor behaviors, payor collaboration, joint operating committees (JOCs)

Solution to external challenge

Need solid data to bring to the payors that both the payor and provider validate; both payors and providers need to be speaking the same language; if there was one source of truth for all data and benchmarking, we can really make positive changes for our communities and patients.

Biggest internal revenue cycle challenge

Staff skill set; being able to support growth; revisiting team structure.

Solution to internal challenge

Get involved with job descriptions and how we build our worklists; we need to breakdown the walls between individual teams, e.g., hospital billing, health information management, revenue integrity; approach the work from an analytics, data perspective.

Describe your organization’s relationship with payors in one word

Non-existent

Favorite revenue cycle KPI

CFB (candidate for billing) as it measures how quickly we are getting our claims billed.

Least favorite revenue cycle KPI

Denials; there are many that have no rhyme or reason and the administrative burden to resolve due to payor games and tactics is nauseating.

How automated is your revenue cycle?

We are around 50% automated with the opportunity to expand; some departments are more so than others.

How clinically integrated is your revenue cycle?

Very integrated; we take pride in being a clinically driven revenue cycle.

If you could change one thing about the Healthcare revenue cycle, it would be...

The patient financial experience; as an industry, we can do so much better in meeting our patients where they are, being fully transparent on the care and cost and being more of a partner and guide.