Healthcare Technology Featured Article

September 29, 2014

Wheelings & Dealings: ZirMed Acquires MethodCare to Improve Data-Driven Business Decisions


A McKinsey & Co. study stated the U.S. healthcare industry could potentially save $300 billion a year with the help of advanced analytics. By 2011, U.S. healthcare organizations had generated 150 exabytes or 150 billion gigabytes, and that number is increasing at an incredible rate, which makes it essential for healthcare service providers to deploy predictive analytics solutions in order to improve the overall operations of hospitals, family practices, insurance companies and other industries associated with healthcare. ZirMed, provider of cloud-based enterprise business and clinical performance solution for healthcare, has made a key acquisition to increase its SaaS platform and enterprise reach by purchasing MethodCare.

The Chicago-based MethodCare provides predictive analytics solutions designed to help healthcare organizations meet their financial and clinical excellence goals with advanced analytics to increase revenue and maximize operational efficiencies.

In addition to expanding its presence in Chicago with a new Healthcare Analytics Center of Excellence led by MethodCare's team of data scientists and business intelligence engineers, ZirMed will be able to integrate its flagship SaaS solutions that use predictive analytics in the areas of patient access, charge integrity, and reimbursement. This will give the company a comprehensive end-to-end patient episode of care.

By clearly identifying key areas in which there are revenue leakage it can point out recoverable missed charges, predict denials and appeal success rates, score patients propensity to pay, flag underpayments, and better manage risk-based contracts services currently offered to healthcare providers to improve financial performance across the board.

“By merging MethodCare's proven predictive analytics offering with ZirMed's population health and revenue cycle solutions, health care providers can now take advantage of the first true centralized end-to-end performance management platform to streamline operations and support greater strategic, data-driven business decisions,” said Tom Butts, chief executive officer, ZirMed.

The MethodCare Charge Integrity Solutions uses big data analytics to automate the discovery of all missing charges, coding variances and overcharging risks to proactively prevent charge capture leakage, resolve process inefficiencies, improve coding compliance, and ensure the accuracy of all inpatient and outpatient accounts in one easy-to-use solution.

The Charge Integrity Solutions provides: increases revenue from missed charges; drives higher reimbursement by coding variances; ensures all costs are captured for Medicare cost reports; mitigates risk from overcharging errors; identifies audit concerns before they are problematic; and provides national, state and local benchmarking.

"MethodCare is excited to become a part of ZirMed," said Jeff Kaplan, co-founder and CEO, MethodCare. "Together, we can accelerate the delivery and breadth of revenue cycle and population health solutions that allow healthcare organizations to achieve improved financial performance and deliver the highest quality patient care. ZirMed is a natural fit for us as we share the same commitment to technology innovation and superior client service."




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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