At A Glance
Experian Health’s Patient Access Curator helped Columbus Regional Health (CRH) improve front-end accuracy after a vendor outage exposed workflow gaps. With Patient Access Curator, CRH reduced eligibility denials by 41%, and coordination of benefits and registration denials by 37%, while achieving 97% coverage accuracy.TABLE OF CONTENTS
“Patient Access Curator gave us data visibility we never had with our prior vendor.”
Joyce Predmore, Director of System Patient Access and Financial Clearance, Columbus Regional Health
Challenge: A vendor outage created registration workflow issues
Registration teams at CRH worked hard to keep patient intake moving, but their workflows lacked consistency. Payer selection was handled manually, making it difficult to see why denials were occurring and to take action to prevent them. When a vendor outage took their automated eligibility verification tool offline, leadership saw an opportunity to address these long-standing issues and overhaul the organization’s front-end processes.
CRH needed an immediate fix to reduce errors and registrar guesswork that would trigger more denials. By rethinking how front-end decisions were made, the organization could standardize workflows and give registrars more reliable data to support decision-making. This would prevent eligibility and coordination of benefits errors from reaching claims and billing and set the path for longer-term improvements in revenue cycle performance.
Solution: Improve front-end accuracy with AI
CRH introduced Patient Access Curator™ (PAC) to get eligibility workflows back on track with more accurate front-end data. This solution uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automatically find and correct patient data in real time, covering eligibility, coverage discovery, coordination of benefits, Medicare Beneficiary Identifiers and patient demographics all within a single platform.
Coverage checks that were previously done manually have now been moved into an automated workflow. Patient Access Curator’s AI intelligence layer automates eligibility and coverage verification, and only flags cases that require review. Registrars, armed with stronger tools, can now focus on exceptions, rather than working through every account manually and making split-second judgment calls. This led to fewer registration errors and less time spent on rework and training.
With this new tool, staff were able to support payer selection and eligibility verification while retaining final decision authority. And because Patient Access Curator integrates directly into existing systems, staff can follow the same steps regardless of setting or team. As a result, variation decreased and registrations became more consistent.
Results: Immediate improvements in accuracy, efficiency and visibility
| Patient Access Curator Results: |
| – 41% reduction in eligibility denials |
| – 37% decrease in coordination of benefits and registration denials |
| – 97% coverage accuracy |
Front-end teams saw improvements immediately. With Patient Access Curator taking care of eligibility and coverage checks, staff spent less time on manual tasks and no longer needed to run the same checks multiple times.
Better data means better data flowing through the entire system, further reducing the workload that would otherwise arise from rework and returned mail. Coverage accuracy reached 97% across hospital and professional billing, reflecting major improvements in front-end data quality.
Most importantly, fewer errors making it past registration made a measurable difference to denial rates, resulting in a 41% reduction in eligibility denials and a 37% drop in coordination of benefits and registration denials.
For leadership, Patient Access Curator’s in-built denial analytics offered a more detailed view of performance. “Patient Access Curator gave us data visibility we never had with our prior vendor,” says Joyce Predmore, Director of System Patient Access and Financial Clearance at CRH. This meant they could “significantly reduce the time spent reviewing denials and retraining staff.”
Collaborating to keep performance on point
CRH continued to work closely with Experian Health to build on these improvements post-implementation. Regular performance reviews and ongoing denial analysis helped teams identify eligibility patterns and adjust workflows as needed. Predmore says that this partnership was key to helping them respond quickly to changing payer rules.
“Experian Health facilitated meetings with specific payers and kept us informed if something was happening across Indiana. That communication has been critical to our success.”
Joyce Predmore, Director of System Patient Access and Financial Clearance, Columbus Regional Health
CRH plans to use the same collaborative approach to address other sources of denials, such as claim attachments, and to further improve their workflows and alerts.
Learn how Experian Health’s Patient Access Curator helps healthcare organizations reduce denials and improve front-end accuracy.
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