3 Issues That Defined 2021 for the Revenue Cycle

Price transparency, surprise billing, and a renewed focus on the workforce grabbed much of the focus from revenue cycle leaders during another unprecedented year.

It was another tumultuous year for the revenue cycle, from the slow burn of price transparency and the fight over surprise billing, to the renewed focus on the workforce, not to mention the continuing COVID-19 pandemic.

Here are three issues that defined 2021 for the revenue cycle:

1. PRICE TRANSPARENCY’S SLOW BURN

For all the build-up and fretting over the price transparency rule, it got off a slow start and hasn’t sped up much since. Just a few days after the January 1 compliance deadline, Becky Greenfield, a partner with Wolfe Pincavage, told the HealthLeaders Revenue Cycle Podcast that none of the hospitals she had investigated were fully compliant with the rule yet.

Not much changed as the year progressed. In February, a Guidehouse analysis found that roughly 30% of hospitals weren’t compliant with either requirement of the CMS price transparency rule, and only 48% of hospitals were compliant with at least one element of the machine-readable file requirement.