Krinna Patel
Management Consultant
Practice Management
Solution Set
 PM Application Services
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Consolidating BAR Groups: Pros & Cons
"One of the most important success factors is ensuring effective project planning and management..."
Has your organization ever considered consolidating BAR groups in Centricity Business? If so, there are some Pros and Cons that should be considered before making a final decision. Reorganizing your BAR structure in Centricity Business can make some processes more efficient but there are some potential risks.
Each organization using Centricity Business has their own strategy for organizing financial information within the system. Some choose to create a separate BAR group for each entity in their organization, regardless of TIN, while others require a unique TIN to justify a separate BAR group.
Whatever method you use, at some point you may want to reorganize your BAR groups. Some of the reasons and/or benefits for consolidating BAR groups are:
- Increased efficiency when manually posting payments - you don't have to determine which BAR group the invoice belongs to
- Reduction in manipulation/manual intervention required to generate meaningful financial reports
- Eliminating redundant updates in BAR and in Dictionaries - dunning tables, fee schedules, EDI/ARTS, claim form logic, statements, paycode variances
- The ability to create a single patient statement across a single TIN entity
Improved information sharing across to the entire entity - patient status, i.e. dismissed patient, PCS notes, and financial/general comments
If all these sound like great reasons to start consolidating your BAR groups, there are a few things that need to be considered before getting started:
- Ability to compare current data to historical data may be impacted
- GE recommends resetting all accounts to dunning level zero
- PCS work files have to be updated/modified to remove the "old" group(s) - you may even have to archive and erase the old BAR groups to get PCS to work correctly
- The first time statements are run in the new group, all statements will print all previous activity on the account, generating lengthy statements and a flood of calls to customer service
- Lose a level of hierarchy, i.e. each previous BAR group may become a Division which may mean previous divisions become Billing Areas, losing the previous billing areas
- Resolving duplicate accounts may be problematic if all globals are not correctly updated
- Increase in the amount of data in a single BAR group will increase the size of the FIN directory and may increase the amount of time it takes to process month-end data
- All appropriate TES edits and work files, claim form edits, and ETM views must be updated
- Policies and procedures must be reviewed and standardized across all members of the consolidated BAR group
Although there may seem like there are more risks than benefits, there are usually good financial and productivity reasons for moving forward with consolidating BAR groups. One of the most important success factors is ensuring effective project planning and management. Establishment of steering committee and project structure with appropriate team members and stakeholders is key. Diligent and proactive review of project goals, risks, tasks and overall project status is critical. An accurate and reasonable project timeline must be determined considering all of the items reviewed in this article, your business priorities, and the cultural considerations of your organization.
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