Axea Solutions partners with health systems, hospitals, clinics, and physician practices to drive performance in the heart of the revenue cycle. The company specializes in an array of services, providing award-winning expertise, offering strategic solutions to healthcare organizations that streamline clinical documentation, efficiently managing claims and coding, and accelerating the billing cycle to increase revenues. With technology-enabled services and analytics, Axea helps clients drive quality and revenue integrity across their enterprise.

Axea Solutions was recently named "One of the Top 10 RCM Solution Providers for 2019," by Healthcare Tech Magazine, and earned a spot in the "50 Best workplaces of 2019", from Silicon Review. Axea is committed to creating a workplace environment where employees from different backgrounds and perspectives can realize their full potential while ardently serving clients.

Axea also provides industry-leading education, with its proprietary cloud-based learning management platform Axea Academy®. This platform offers medical coders the ability to upgrade their skills through hands-on experience of ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, and CPT, to earn CEU credits with AHIMA and AAPC accredited courses. Axea Academy® uniquely provides coding managers with coding skills– testing and evaluation for coder candidates and newly hired coders, with self-paced learning modules to help them test and apply their knowledge. Axea Academy® helps to unfold the nuances of coding guidelines, and its relation to clinical documentation.

Susan Gatehouse is the Founder and CEO of Axea Solutions. She is a nationally recognized speaker and author, with a nearly 30-year history as a leading provider of revenue cycle solutions, and innovative insights to the healthcare industry. Susan founded Axea Solutions in 1999 with the primary goal of providing clients with current, thorough, and accurate auditing services and education. Under Susan's leadership, Axea has become recognized as one of the leading revenue cycle enhancement and solution-oriented providers in the healthcare sector.

An Insightful Leader

Susan believes nothing replaces hard work and experience, it is simply part of the journey. At the outset of her HIM career, she submersed herself in diverse healthcare settings, which provided her an organic understanding of the revenue cycle. She built the company on a solid foundation of industry knowledge at the rudimentary level, creating a holistic problem-solving mindset. In her words, a problem understood is a problem half solved and knowledge provides the power to solve issues that create sustainable transformation versus transactional change, often referred to as the band-aid method. Over time, band-aids become quite costly for organizations.

Susan is a firm believer in being active and engaged within the business community, and has given numerous presentations at national conferences and events for organizations such as AHIMA, HFMA, GHIMA, and GHA. As an industry expert, she has authored a variety of articles and is featured regularly in healthcare publications on topics related to revenue cycle management.

Susan was a contributing author and editor for the book, "Implementing Information Security in Healthcare: Building a Security Program," and contributed to the CDC manual, "Moving Science to Coverage." Among her many professional achievements, Susan is a recipient of the Georgia Health Information Management Association Professional Achievement Award, and was named "Female vendor RCM leader to know of 2018, in Becker's Healthcare list of RCM leaders. She was recently interviewed in a segment for public television on the future of technology and AI in healthcare, which will air on PBS, and other affiliated channels fall 2020.

Overcoming Business Challenges

Susan remarks that the fear of making the wrong decision is one of the primal challenges of many start-up businesses. Such fear can immobilize progress and innovation to ultimately cause the demise of a company. Thus, being an inherent observer, absorbing and pondering information comes naturally to her. However, in a leadership role, it is important not to get bogged down by information that can stifle the decision-making process. Susan says that one must trust their knowledge and the knowledge of those that surround them, while making informed decisions, recognizing mistakes will be made, and the course of action may change. She feels permanence is not a guarantee in any business, and is certainly not a word often used in healthcare.

Leadership Driving Transformational Change

There are many different leadership styles, all equally effective and valuable to an organization, remarks Susan. She believes that transformational leaders share a common thread in that they are passionate about the objectives in which they seek to inspire others to accomplish and tend to be hands-on in reaching goals and embracing opportunities to advance others to succeed as well. All leaders, regardless of personal style, benefit from introspective improvement, finding new ways to help employees, company growth, and team collaboration. She says being an active listener is one of the most important qualities at the forefront of transformational change, individuals often evolve, through experience and self-improvement, to change their particular leadership style.

Improving Healthcare with Data and Automation

Susan began her career working on a more granular analysis type level, but as it broadened into all aspects of the hospital revenue cycle, she discovered just how much technology, and data integrity is crucial. In her early days, prior to the availability of automation tools, Susan quickly began to understand the phrase "garbage in, garbage out," and realized the power of accurate data. Learning the repercussions hospitals endured from inaccurate data, and the millions of dollars lost, ultimately affecting patient care and cost, she shifted the company's focus to developing more technology solutions to validate data and automate processes, and drive the due diligence required for proper evaluation.

Leveraging Disruptive Technologies For The Future

With a broad scope of expertise in providing solutions to solve the complex issues that affect the quality of care and financial outcomes within health care institutions, the company is looking ahead to expand data management automation and integration capabilities, adds Susan. Axea Solutions is continuously expanding its technology to further support automating workflow for increasing speed and efficiency, by means of data integrity. Axea Solutions thus pursues firmly on its mission to provide a streamlined healthcare data management workflow to foster the financial success of its clients.

Continual Professional Development For Emerging Leaders

"Surround yourself by individuals smarter than yourself", remains one of Susan's favourite sayings, in addition to "if you are the smartest person in the room; change rooms."

Today, many female leaders have blazed the trail. She advise emerging leaders to try and find a mentor in their industry for guidance and wise counsel. With constant developments in emerging technologies, it is vital to stay abreast of innovation and industry changes as they occur. A mindset of lifelong learning is paramount while realizing one can never ask too many questions. She adds, that it is critical to remember that patience is a virtue; attaining leadership in any field takes time to achieve. Continual professional development is vital, as is taking advantage of situations that are learning opportunities. Do not underestimate the power of poor decisions; they should not define an individual's ability as long as they learn from them every time.