The Art And Science Of Healthcare Data Curation

By definition, a curator is one whose role is to acquire, care for, and develop a collection, and in Wave HDC’s case, the collection is data.

Billions are saved in fraud and administrative waste when we have accurate demographic and insurance data.

n the context of the revenue cycle, having clean and precise data is crucial for optimizing billing processes, reducing claim denials, and improving overall financial outcomes. In true curator fashion, Wave HDC transacts and arranges data to interpret it into actionable information, which drives workflow automation. For a customer, we help automate intake and triage billing. As a steward of healthcare revenue cycle, Wave HDC drives efficiency by resolving some of the fraud and waste that occurs but is completely avoidable as data is curated into actionable, accurate information.

How We Help Our Customers

Our audience, the group for whom we curate, is a consortium of customer types. These customers rely on Wave HDC to fix intake and registration information to triage and automate billing, claiming, and their self-pay workflow. We curate data in the initial workflow stages, so our customers can convert A/R to cash as quickly as possible.

Wave HDC’s one-of-a-kind approach was recognized by the United States Patent and Trademark Office in 2021. Curation is an art and a science, and Wave HDC is fortunate enough to be a recognized innovator both by industry and by the federal agency.

Curators often aren’t artists, just as Wave HDC is neither a provider nor a biller. Providers, billers, and auditors look to us to improve their data integrity and expedite the conversion of data to reimbursement as curators improve and prepare a piece of art.

Winning The War On Bad Debt

So what is this data Wave HDC curates, and how does it save the industry billions? At the heart of customer relationship management (CRM) is knowing your customer (KYC). But in healthcare, the heart of the revenue cycle is having enough accurate data to know whom and what to bill. Seems simple enough, right?

In 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals alone accounted for $56.5B in reported bad debt, according to HFMA’s Bad Debt Expense Benchmark report. That excludes charity care, which came in at an estimated $105B that same year, according to an American Hospital Association report.

The rates of uncompensated care continue to climb, just like insurance premiums and patient liability. Everything is getting more expensive, and the message we’d like to broadcast to the world is that it doesn’t have to be that way. With efficiency, we can slow the rise in costs and uncompensated care. We can solve problems by breaking them down, doing a root cause analysis, and maintaining a KYC focus.

Billions are saved in fraud (intentional and inadvertent) and administrative waste when we have accurate demographic and insurance data. To achieve this goal, we need curators and good stewards who look out for the integrity of the data. By leveraging the power of real-time automation, AI, and In-Memory Analytics, we’ve identified the solution to the accuracy and efficiency dilemma.

Where’s The Proof?

If you need hard proof that our system works, it’s simple. Send us a file of your A/R, and let’s see how much of it curation will cure, allowing records to pass your scrubbers and edits and drop without human intervention. We at Wave HDC believe in it so much we guarantee the results!

We’re not the first to realize that a simple solution is the best answer. 14^th-century logician and Franciscan Friar William of Ockham is credited for Occam’s Razor. Aristotle wrote, “The more limited, if adequate, is always preferable,” and Ptolemy wrote, “We consider it a good principle to explain the phenomena by the simplest hypothesis possible.”

I know…I’m digressing, but I prefer Occam’s Razor. Why? Because it suggests shaving issues, Wave HDC can demonstrate that we can shave the symptoms that mask the problem by curating data upstream as early as possible. We do it so well, in fact, that the workload of your back-office staff will be reduced, leaving little to analyze, because the root cause of the issue can be automagically resolved!

Essentially, a higher rate of first-pass clean claims, the opportunity to do more with less staff, and a faster conversion rate prove that Wave HDC’s hypothesis was correct; sometimes, you just need some help from the healthcare data curator!

Ready to learn more about how we can assist your organization? Reach out to us today!