Where most technology innovation is happening in the cloud, companies are seeking to expand their cloud offerings by acquiring technology and engineering resources. These acquisitions can ultimately help healthcare organizations improve their back office processes, like the coordination of benefits at the start of a patient journey, while a new company-agnostic benchmarking assessment tool can enable revenue cycle leaders to prioritize and plan for technology modernization. 

Experian Health acquires Wave HDC

Experian announced Thursday it has acquired Wave HDC, a healthcare data automation company that leverages artificial intelligence to ascertain insurance benefits coverage and critical patient demographics data for hospitals, laboratories, billing companies and physician groups.

Claim denials, often a result of missing or inaccurate eligibility information, contribute to more than $200 billion per year in lost revenue, according to the company.

The addition of Wave HDC will bolster Experian Health by adding more comprehensive and faster healthcare coverage identification and automation capabilities during patient registration, Experian said. 

By combining Experian's clearinghouse data and Wave HDC’s insurance data capture technology, users can search for essential insurance and patient demographics with a single inquiry to minimize delayed reimbursements and increase efficiency, according to the company.

"Our mission is to simplify healthcare, and this move allows us to quickly scale our portfolio with advanced logic and AI-powered technology to help solve one of the biggest administrative problems providers face today, which is claim denials," Tom Cox, president of Experian Health, said in a statement. 

“We believe this integration will have a powerful impact for the healthcare industry, improving financial solvency and efficiencies for providers through more accurate medical billing, resulting in potentially more reimbursement, faster," Jordan Levitt, Wave HDC president and chief executive officer, added.

Last year, Wave HDC bought Goodvisit, a provider of fee estimation, denial prevention and work list tools, onboarding the vendor's team and technology. Tom Wall, Goodvisit cofounder and CTO, said at the time that Wave HDC's APIs were feeding more health systems with better data.

Accenture adds cloud developers to AWS team

Accenture has acquired Ocelot Consulting, a cloud consultancy specializing in full-stack development, data engineering, data science, and strategy and execution for cloud modernization, to expand its Amazon Web Services engineering skills, the company said last week.

Adding the St. Louis, Missouri-based Ocelot Consulting team to the Accenture AWS Business Group is expected to help clients in North America accelerate cloud transformation and development of artificial intelligence systems, according to Andy Tay, global lead of Accenture Cloud First.

"Ocelot Consulting increases our talent base of multi-skilled engineers to help clients build a strong digital core – powered by cloud, data and AI – and to achieve new performance frontiers," he said in a statement. 

“For the past seven years, we have focused on sharing our transformational lessons learned in agility, cloud, security and development operations with other companies in the region,” added Tyler Robert, cofounder and president of Ocelot Consulting. 

In January, Accenture Federal Services and Leidos partnered to support the U.S. Centers for Disease Control's cloud modernization.

New revenue cycle modernization tool available

The Healthcare Financial Management Association announced an alliance with FinThrive, a healthcare revenue cycle management software-as-a-service provider, to co-launch a peer-reviewed, five-stage Revenue Cycle Management Technology Adoption Model.

RCMTAM is designed to help health systems leverage industry benchmarks to assess their current state of RCM technology maturity and build best-practice plans to optimize revenue cycle outcomes.

"In a departure from conventional models, this approach prioritizes the deliberate implementation of technology within healthcare organizations," said HFMA senior vice president Richard Gundling in a statement.

"We believe in the enhanced problem-solving capabilities of using maturity models, particularly RCMTAM, to guide organizations toward sustainable and effective revenue cycle management."

Hemant Goel, CEO of FinThrive, explained that the company's analysis of more than 30,000 individual data points found 42% of health systems were in the earliest stages of their revenue cycle digital transformation. 

"This affirmed our hypothesis that although many health systems know they need to transform and automate their revenue cycles, they haven't had a blueprint to guide them," he said in an announcement. 

"Through collaboration with HFMA and health system early adopters, we are eager to contribute valuable insights that empower revenue cycle leaders on their path to financial excellence in healthcare."

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.