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ZirMed readies launch of new payment matching Remit and Deposit Management system

The company said the new system is designed to help provider organizations greatly reduce the manual work involved with reconciling payments.

Bill Siwicki, Managing Editor, Healthcare IT News

Tom Butts, CEO of Zirmed, being interviewed at HIMSS15.

Revenue cycle management company ZirMed will launch its new Remit and Deposit Management system at HIMSS16, the company said.

The company said the new system is designed to help provider organizations greatly reduce the manual work typically involved with reconciling payments.

Provider organizations waste a tremendous amount of time manually matching payments with remittance advice, the information that associates payment amounts with corresponding services, said Ric Sinclair, vice president of product at ZirMed.

[Also: Meridian Health taps Patientco for revenue cycle, touts payment tools]

"Providers have to go through a very manual, intense and burdensome process to reconcile payment information with the actual dollars on hand," he added.

ZirMed's Remit and Deposit Management system takes all the information from a provider organization's bank accounts and in real time uses proprietary algorithms to compare and match data, company officials said.

"This matching process can become a mega-problem when you think about all of the complexities in healthcare today," Sinclair said. "As organizations make acquisitions and deal with new payment models, the number of bank accounts and the number of ways to get paid increases. This results in a gigantic payment posting cash reconciliation process, with a lot of money coming in and the need to figure out how to apply and distribute it."

[Also: Navigant buys McKinnis Consultants for $52 million]

At one healthcare organization pilot testing the new system, ZirMed said it was able to automatically match 97 percent of payments and remits, a process that would take an individual 3 to 4 minutes per match, with thousands of matches required every day. That left the organization to only have to match the 3 percent of exceptions. However, Remit and Deposit Management offers tools that assist individuals with matching the remainders, tools that cut the time this process took by 50 percent.

ZirMed declined to reveal this client organization, but Sinclair said it will do so at HIMSS16.

"At our pilot clients, their overall time to reconcile is going from hours and hours of multiple staff members a business day to one full-time employee in less than an hour a day," Sinclair said. "This becomes killer when you think about all the healthcare organizations looking at bundled payment models and new contracts with insurance plans that include things like being reimbursed a single payment for an entire episode of care."

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT