A person behind the performance: Troy Spring
Troy Spring is Vice President, Enterprise Revenue Cycle, at Intermountain Health, the health system based in Salt Lake City. Spring oversees revenue cycle at Intermountain, which includes the Peaks Region based in Broomfield, Colorado. Kodiak Solutions recognized Intermountain Health—Peaks Region 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 | 56 |
| Tenure with organization | Nine years |
| Reports to | Vice President of Revenue Services |
| Number of direct reports | Four |
| Number of Peaks Region care sites reporting revenue | Eight hospitals; 150 clinics |
| Annual revenue cycle budget | $90 million |
| Number of revenue cycle FTEs | 1,200 |
| Work modality | Hybrid |
| Patient accounting system | Epic |
| Number of revenue cycle vendors | Nine |
| Fully outsources revenue cycle or in-house revenue cycle team | In-house |
| Department reporting structure (links to Finance, managed care, other) | Finance |
| Biggest external revenue cycle challenge | Payor behaviors, increased denials, and longer time to pay. The Change Healthcare breach also has been a significant disruptor to operations and cash flow. |
| Solution to external challenge | Working closely with payor contracting and legal teams, where appropriate, to put pressure on payors to address bad behaviors. |
| Biggest internal revenue cycle challenge | Implementing the right technology that will make the biggest impact. Let’s not implement AI (artificial intelligence) for AI’s sake. Implement what’s going to make the biggest positive impact for our patients. |
| Solution to internal challenge | Evaluating the best solutions or building our own technology. |
| Describe your organization’s relationship with payors in one word | Challenging. To say the least. Historically we valued having good relationships with our payors and, while that is still our aim, denials and claim underpayments make this a real challenge. |
| Favorite revenue cycle KPI | Cash versus goal. Everything we do in the revenue cycle should ultimately result in cash. |
| Least favorite revenue cycle KPI | I love KPIs, and I don't know that I have a least favorite. All KPIs work together to determine where we have opportunities. |
| How automated is your revenue cycle? | We are an Epic shop, so we use Epic native automation functionality. We are also building our own in-house automation as well to support Epic. But we are interested in not just implementing automation for automation's sake but, instead, implementing automation that drives better outcomes and results. |
| How clinically integrated is your revenue cycle? | We are a very clinically integrated system, which is key to driving excellent performance. |
| If you could change one thing about the Healthcare revenue cycle, what would it be? | In a perfect world, we could work more collaboratively with our payors and reduce waste. We spend/waste a lot of resources getting services authorized (and most are approved) and denials overturned (most of which get paid) both on the payor and provider sides. |