Expert’s Corner: Dan Hildebrandt for Avelead CashID

Avelead’s Dan Hildebrandt has built an excellent reputation as the go-to guy for everything that involves Avelead CashID, a software that helps hospitals reconcile their financial deposits. With his extensive experience, he, along with Avelead’s other experts, has been able to recover thousands of dollars for hospitals that might have never noticed the discrepancies within their systems. Ultimately, all this hard work isn’t just for the numbers – it’s to make sure that hospitals have everything they need to be held accountable and to be able to give patients the best experiences possible.

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Hey there, Dan! To start, tell us about your educational background and career experience.

My undergrad started at the University of Montana. I went out there and actually was a business guy! I eventually made a few changes, came back to Minnesota and my first job was with Wells Fargo, so I always have had a taste for finance. I also worked for a retail bank for a little while, then I moved to asset-backed securities where I was dealing with securitizations for auto loans. What that means is that once dealerships would sell cars, they would then bundle up those loans and sell them off to investors. My job kept that whole functionality going and I worked on the actual payments for those investments.

And how has your career shifted since then?

I realized, about five years in, that I was not that interested in the banking world. It really wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in, so I spoke to one of my friends and became a Medicare auditor for a couple of years. Even then, I realized that I still hadn’t found exactly what I was looking for. 

Once I connected with some good friends at Avelead and told them that I was looking for a way to take a deeper dive into healthcare, I eventually worked my way to where I am now. Also, because of working at Avelead, I was able to go back to school and finish my master’s degree from the University of Mary.

How are healthcare and finance together different than just dealing with finance alone?

Healthcare and finance together are great because it’s all about making sure what we do relates back to the patients and making sure we’re doing what’s best for them. That’s always been my driving factor.

With just finance or banking with my experiences, it was only about sales goals and the numbers, which was a huge turnoff to me.

To get into Avelead CashID, how is it knowing that YOU’RE the person people go to for CashID expertise?

It’s exciting, to say the least! I’ve been doing this for a year and a half now and I love it when people come to me and bring up new ideas. It’s nice to get some fresh knowledge coming at me because there are factors that even I haven’t thought of yet! I never want the fact that I’m the expert to narrow my vision, so I like hearing different ways of doing things.

What makes Avelead CashID so different compared to its competitors?

It would definitely be the ability to customize the application to the client’s needs. With it, we’re able to pull extracts out of any EHR system and can work with any type of big files hospitals have. For example, we can take clients’ Excel sheets or even your BAI2 files and work with them to make sure we’re providing the most unique product that will streamline all workflows for specifically their needs only.

With the implementation of Avelead CashID, how has time been reduced for hospitals?

As far as your day-to-day tasks such as the pulling down of the files and the actual divvying up the work, those things were typically done in half an hour if you were quick. If you had a lot of deposits, that could take you two hours to finish. We’ve completely reduced that time to zero because we automatically take care of all that work. 

There are also outlier factors such as having to manually sign a check that comes in that you’ve never seen before. This can take anywhere from five to 20 minutes of your time but CashID is set up in a way where with just a few clicks, you can have it sent off to anyone on your dropdown menu.

As far as the end of the month is concerned, the typical turnaround for the end of the month was three days, according to a client of ours. Because of their workflow, they weren’t even meeting that three-day turnaround for compiling their numbers! We’ve basically transformed their process with our system so that all they need to do is pull down a single report. Because of some small modifications that need to occur on those reports, a three-day process has turned into a six-hour process now. We’re hoping to reduce that number even further.

How does Avelead CashID affect patients? How has it helped them?

With CashID and LPL patients, the quicker that funds are posted and the more streamlined the billing process is, the faster that patients’ owed balances go down. Another factor that benefits both hospitals and patients is that through CashID, we can drive down the cost of healthcare through streamlining, which makes them more efficient overall. So, if we’re able to simplify the workflow process for cash posting, it’s just another area that hospitals don’t have to spend all their money on.

Wow! So, by driving down overall costs, hospitals can put their time and effort back into the most important parts of their systems, such as the patients!

Exactly!

What are some successes that Avelead CashID has had so far?

There have been several instances where we’ve located possible incorrect GL postings. While I can’t tell you exact numbers for specific clients, I can tell you it’s well over $100,000 of incorrect or unfinished postings, almost monthly, that we’re able to find. It’s those quick catches that add value for our clientele.

What are some future plans for Avelead CashID?

What we’re looking to do is to integrate both the front and back end of CashID. We want to expand our integration with the 835 process. We want to get better at being able to say, ‘Hey, this specific 835 is for this specific check.’ We want to be able to provide a roadmap to cash posters to make sure they know exactly what they need to go through and post.

Something we’re kind of already doing on the back end is integration into finance systems as well. Right now, what finance departments do when they receive their documentation from CashID is they will go through and update their GLs, which is just them going through and balancing their accounts. What we do right now is provide an extract future state, which we’re hoping we can fully integrate into whatever finance system that the hospital chain is using. With that, we’re able to provide real-time data over to the hospital’s finance department to help them out more and for us to ensure our numbers are always correct.

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Thanks to brilliant minds at Avelead like Dan Hildebrandt, hospitals can gain back control of their cash management processes and refocus their efforts into achieving their future goals. With Avelead CashID specifically, hospitals can now have a clear view of all the high-dollar transactions that are flowing in and out of their organizations daily and have the opportunity to fix mistakes long before they can affect their compliance.