CRIS FAQs
Questions about CRIS should be easy to answer.
CRIS covers revenue-cycle intelligence, operations, financial analysis, workflow, controls and management oversight.
That can raise a lot of questions.
This page brings the most common ones together in one place so you can understand what CRIS does, how it works, how your data is handled, how implementation works and what to consider before deciding whether it fits your organisation.
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What is CRIS?
CRIS is a web-based revenue-cycle intelligence, operations and control platform for healthcare organisations.
It helps organisations understand what is happening across their revenue cycle, identify where money or work may be getting stuck, investigate why it is happening and manage the actions needed to resolve it.
In simple terms:
CRIS helps turn scattered revenue-cycle data into understandable problems, accountable work and management visibility.
What problem does CRIS solve?
Healthcare organisations can have large amounts of information across billing systems, remittance files, spreadsheets, reports and departmental trackers.
The problem is often not that the information does not exist.
The problem is that it can be difficult to answer basic management questions such as:
Where is revenue being delayed?
Why are these claims still unpaid?
Which denials keep happening?
Are we being paid what we expected?
Who is responsible for the next action?
Was the problem actually resolved?
CRIS is designed to help bring those answers together.
Is CRIS just another dashboard?
No.
Dashboards are part of CRIS, but CRIS is intended to do more than display charts.
It connects analytical results to the underlying issue, operational work, ownership, evidence and follow-up.
A useful result should help someone move from:
“Something looks wrong.”
to
“This is what happened, this is why it matters, this is who owns it, and this is what should happen next.”
Is CRIS an EHR?
No.
CRIS is not an Electronic Health Record.
It is not designed to replace the clinical system used to document patient care.
CRIS focuses on the financial, operational, analytical and control side of the healthcare revenue cycle.
Is CRIS a billing system?
CRIS is not intended to replace every billing or practice-management system.
Existing systems can remain the systems where claims are created, submitted or processed.
CRIS can sit across those systems and help organisations analyse, manage and control what happens afterwards.
Does CRIS replace our existing systems?
Usually, no.
CRIS is designed to work alongside existing revenue-cycle systems and source data.
The aim is not to force an organisation to replace every system before gaining better visibility.
Is CRIS an Excel product?
No.
CRIS is a web-based platform.
CSV and Excel files may be used as governed source-data formats where appropriate, particularly when organisations need to bring information from existing systems into CRIS.
The spreadsheet is therefore a source of information, not the CRIS operating environment.
Who is CRIS designed for?
CRIS is designed for healthcare organisations that need stronger visibility and control over their revenue cycle.
This can include:
- Healthcare executives
- Revenue-cycle leaders
- Finance teams
- Billing and RCM operations teams
- Revenue integrity teams
- Audit, risk and control functions
- Multi-facility healthcare organisations
Does someone need to be a revenue-cycle expert to understand CRIS?
No.
CRIS should make complicated revenue-cycle information easier to understand.
Specialist users can investigate the detail they need, while executives and other users can work from a clearer management view.
The objective is not to make everyone learn technical RCM terminology before they can use the information.
What parts of the revenue cycle can CRIS cover?
Depending on the modules and configuration implemented, CRIS can support areas such as:
- Claims
- Remittances
- Payments
- Denials
- Appeals
- Accounts receivable
- Follow-up
- Underpayment analysis
- Revenue exposure
- Reconciliation
- Workflow
- Assignments
- Escalations
- Recovery tracking
- Management reporting
Can CRIS show where claims are getting stuck?
Yes.
CRIS can help analyse claims and operational work according to status, age, payer, facility, provider, service line and other available dimensions.
The objective is to help teams identify where work is slowing down or remaining unresolved.
Can CRIS help with denials?
Yes.
CRIS can bring denial information together so teams can investigate questions such as:
Which denial reasons occur most often?
Which payers generate the most denials?
Where are denials increasing?
How much financial value is affected?
Which denials remain unresolved?
Who is working them?
Are the same causes repeating?
Can CRIS manage appeals?
CRIS can support the operational management of appeal-related work where that capability is configured.
That can include ownership, priority, due dates, follow-up, supporting evidence and outcome tracking.
Can CRIS help with A/R?
Yes.
CRIS can provide visibility into outstanding accounts and help teams understand more than just the total A/R balance.
For example:
How old is the outstanding balance?
Which payer is involved?
Where is the balance concentrated?
What has already been done?
Who owns the next action?
Which accounts require attention first?
Can CRIS analyse underpayments?
Yes.
Revenue integrity is one of the important areas CRIS is designed to support.
But CRIS should not treat every payment difference as a confirmed underpayment.
The platform can distinguish between:
- A payment difference
- A potential underpayment
- A validated underpayment
- A recovery opportunity
- A verified outcome
That distinction helps prevent preliminary findings from being reported as confirmed revenue.
Does CRIS automatically mean every variance is money owed to us?
No.
A difference is a signal to investigate.
It may eventually prove to be a valid underpayment, or there may be another legitimate explanation.
CRIS is designed to preserve that distinction.
Can CRIS show how much money has actually been recovered?
Where recovery information is available and appropriately recorded, CRIS can distinguish between money that may be recoverable and a recovery that has actually been verified.
That matters because:
Finding a possible opportunity is not the same as receiving the money.
Can CRIS compare payers?
Yes.
CRIS can support payer-level analysis using the information available to the organisation.
That may include measures such as:
- Payment behaviour
- Denials
- Outstanding A/R
- Underpayment patterns
- Processing time
- Follow-up workload
- Revenue exposure
Can CRIS compare facilities?
Yes.
Multi-facility organisations can use CRIS to view performance across facilities while preserving appropriate organisational separation and access controls.
The same principle can be applied to other useful dimensions such as payer, provider and service line where the source data supports them.
What happens after CRIS identifies a problem?
A useful revenue-cycle platform should not stop at identifying the issue.
CRIS can connect findings to operational work.
That can include:
- Assignments
- Work queues
- Priorities
- Due dates
- Follow-up
- Notifications
- Escalations
- Evidence
- Closure
This helps move the organisation from information to action.
Can CRIS assign work to specific people?
Yes.
Work can be assigned to appropriate users, teams or roles according to the configured operating model.
Can work be prioritised?
Yes.
Priority can be based on configured factors such as:
- Financial value
- Age
- Deadline
- Risk
- Payer
- Issue type
- Repeated occurrence
- Management significance
Can CRIS track overdue work?
Yes.
Due dates and service expectations can be monitored, with reminders or escalations where configured.
What does closure mean in CRIS?
Closure should mean more than someone clicking “Complete.”
Where required, the platform can expect appropriate evidence, outcome information or other closure requirements before work is treated as resolved.
Can managers see who owns an issue?
Yes.
Ownership and accountability are important parts of the CRIS operating model.
Managers should be able to understand who is responsible for the next action and which work remains outstanding.
What is CRIS CORE?
CRIS CORE provides executive and management-level revenue-cycle intelligence.
It is designed to help leadership understand overall performance, revenue exposure, collections, A/R, denials and other important management signals.
What is CRIS RCM?
CRIS RCM focuses on operational revenue-cycle intelligence.
It helps teams understand workflow performance, bottlenecks, claims progression, denial activity, A/R and follow-up.
What is CRIS REVINT?
CRIS REVINT focuses on revenue integrity and financial intelligence.
It supports areas such as payment variance analysis, potential underpayments, validated underpayments, recovery evidence and financial reconciliation.
What is CRIS STATS?
CRIS STATS provides statistical intelligence.
It is intended to help organisations move beyond looking at isolated numbers by examining distributions, variation, anomalies and trends.
Do we need every CRIS module?
Not necessarily.
CRIS is intended to support modular commercial arrangements.
The modules required should depend on the organisation's needs, priorities and implementation scope.
What information does CRIS need?
That depends on what the organisation wants CRIS to analyse.
Possible source information may include:
- Claims
- Remittances
- Payments
- Denials
- Adjustments
- A/R
- Payer information
- Provider information
- Facility information
- Service information
- Contract or reimbursement information where appropriate
- Operational workflow information
The implementation process determines what is required for the agreed scope.
How does information get into CRIS?
CRIS can support governed source intake.
Depending on the implementation, this may include structured files such as CSV or XLSX and other approved integration approaches.
Can we upload Excel files?
Where XLSX import is supported for the relevant data source, yes.
CRIS should validate and govern the information rather than treating every uploaded spreadsheet as automatically correct.
Can we use CSV files?
Yes, where CSV is the agreed source format.
Does CRIS simply import whatever we upload?
No.
The CRIS Data Hub is designed around controlled data intake.
Depending on configuration, that can include:
- Source profiling
- Field mapping
- Validation
- Duplicate protection
- Dry run
- Reconciliation
- Import history
What is a dry run?
A dry run allows the system to test how an import would be handled before committing the information to the live process.
Plain English: CRIS can check the file before actually using it.
What happens if the data contains errors?
Validation can identify issues that need to be corrected or reviewed before the data is accepted for its intended use.
The exact controls depend on the source and implementation.
Can CRIS prevent duplicate imports?
Duplicate protection is part of the governed intake model.
The precise rules depend on the source data and configuration.
Can CRIS connect to our existing software?
Integration requirements vary considerably between organisations.
CRIS is designed so that existing systems can remain source systems rather than requiring all operational systems to be replaced.
The appropriate integration method would be assessed during implementation.
Can historical data be brought into CRIS?
Potentially, yes.
Historical migration depends on the quality, availability, format and agreed scope of the source data.
Historical data should normally be assessed and validated before it is relied upon.
What happens if our source data is poor?
CRIS can help identify certain data-quality issues, but software cannot manufacture reliable information that never existed.
Data quality should therefore be assessed during onboarding and continuously monitored where appropriate.
Can CRIS show where a number came from?
Source lineage is an important CRIS principle.
Where implemented for the relevant result, CRIS should help users follow an analytical result back toward the source information, rule or calculation that produced it.
This helps answer:
“Why does this number say what it says?”
What is reconciliation?
Reconciliation means comparing records or totals and investigating why they do not agree.
CRIS can use reconciliation as a control rather than simply assuming that two imported totals are correct.
Does CRIS keep an audit history?
Auditability is part of the CRIS control approach.
The exact events recorded depend on the platform area and deployment, but important actions should be traceable where required.
Does CRIS use patient information?
Revenue-cycle information can sometimes include patient-related information.
CRIS is designed to minimise unnecessary exposure and to use controlled identity mechanisms where appropriate.
What is the CRIS Patient Key?
The Patient Key is a controlled identifier used to connect records relating to the same patient while reducing the need to display direct patient identity throughout analytical and operational screens.
Plain English: CRIS can recognise that records belong to the same person without showing the person's identity everywhere.
Does every CRIS user see patient names?
They should not simply see patient identity because they have access to CRIS.
Identity access should depend on legitimate need, role and configured permissions.
What is masked identity?
Masked identity means that direct identifying information is hidden or reduced where it is not required for the user's work.
Can patient identity ever be revealed?
Where an authorised user genuinely requires patient identity for an approved operational purpose, a controlled reveal process can be used where implemented.
That access should be appropriately governed and auditable.
Should patient information be submitted through the public CRIS website?
No.
The public website and its enquiry forms should not be used to submit patient records, claims data, medical record numbers, member identifiers or other sensitive healthcare information.
Approved customer deployment channels should be used for production information.
Is CRIS HIPAA certified?
CRIS should not make an unsupported claim that the software is “HIPAA certified.”
HIPAA readiness depends on more than the existence of software settings.
Production deployment requires the relevant administrative, technical, contractual and operational safeguards to be implemented and evidenced in the approved environment.
Does having security controls mean the deployment is automatically production-ready?
No.
A designed control is not the same as an implemented and tested control.
Production approval should consider areas such as:
- Authentication
- Access control
- Environment isolation
- Encryption
- Audit controls
- Backup and recovery
- Incident response
- Retention
- Administrative access
- Vendor governance
- Actual deployment evidence
Does CRIS support user access control?
Yes.
Access control is an important part of CRIS.
The exact permission model depends on deployment and configuration.
Can users from one customer see another customer's information?
CRIS is designed around tenant separation.
Production readiness should include testing and evidence confirming that the implemented deployment properly enforces the required isolation.
Is CRIS encrypted?
Encryption is part of the production security architecture.
Specific encryption, key-management and infrastructure arrangements depend on the approved production deployment.
Does CRIS support MFA?
MFA can form part of the authentication controls for production deployment.
Actual configuration and testing should be validated in the deployed environment.
Does CRIS have backup and recovery controls?
Backup and recovery are part of production-readiness requirements.
The important question is not simply whether a backup feature exists, but whether backup integrity and restoration have actually been tested.
Is there a formal security review for buyers?
The Security & Trust area explains the CRIS security approach.
The Trust Centre is intended to become the more formal procurement and due-diligence area for security evidence, deployment controls, questionnaires, policies and supporting documentation.
How do we get started with CRIS?
A typical implementation begins by understanding:
- Your organisation
- Facilities
- Existing systems
- Available source data
- Revenue-cycle priorities
- Required CRIS modules
- Users and roles
- Reporting requirements
- Security requirements
- Integration requirements
The implementation scope can then be defined.
Does CRIS work immediately after purchase?
Configuration and implementation are required before the system should be relied upon for production use.
CRIS needs to understand the organisation, data and operating model it is supporting.
How long does implementation take?
There is no single implementation duration that is appropriate for every customer.
Timing depends on factors such as:
- Number of facilities
- Modules purchased
- Data quality
- Historical migration
- Integrations
- Security requirements
- User structure
- Configuration complexity
- Customer readiness
A more accurate implementation estimate should therefore follow scope assessment.
Do we need an IT team to implement CRIS?
Technical involvement will usually be required for areas such as source systems, integrations, infrastructure, authentication or security.
The level of IT involvement depends on the deployment model.
Do our staff need training?
Yes.
Training should be aligned to the user's role.
An executive does not need the same training as a revenue-cycle analyst or system administrator.
Can CRIS be configured for our organisation?
Yes.
CRIS is designed to operate according to the organisation, facilities, roles, workflows, thresholds and other relevant configuration agreed for the deployment.
Can different facilities have different users?
Yes.
Access can be structured according to the organisation's operating model and the permissions implemented for the deployment.
How is CRIS priced?
CRIS pricing can consider factors such as:
- Plan
- Modules
- Claim-volume band
- Organisation requirements
- Implementation scope
- Optional add-ons
- Commercial support requirements
Some organisations may require custom pricing.
Are all CRIS prices shown publicly?
Not necessarily.
Standard pricing can be presented where appropriate, while larger or more complex organisations may be directed to Contact Sales.
Are there implementation fees?
Implementation charges may apply.
These depend on the work required to configure and deploy CRIS for the customer.
Is implementation included in the subscription?
The commercial structure should clearly show what is included in the recurring licence and what is charged separately.
Implementation may therefore be quoted separately depending on the plan and scope.
Can we buy one module instead of the entire platform?
The CRIS commercial model is designed to support modular licensing.
Exact module availability and dependencies should be confirmed during the sales process.
What determines our claim-volume band?
The applicable commercial definition should be shown clearly in the pricing structure and customer agreement.
The aim is to ensure both CRIS and the customer understand how the relevant volume is measured.
Can pricing change?
Commercial terms are governed by the applicable offer and customer agreement.
Public website prices and labels may be updated over time.
The signed agreement governs the actual customer arrangement.
Do you offer custom enterprise pricing?
Yes.
Organisations with complex structures, higher volumes, multiple facilities, specialised integrations or other requirements can request a tailored commercial proposal.
Is CRIS web-based?
Yes.
CRIS is designed as a web-based platform.
Do users need to install CRIS on every computer?
The normal CRIS experience is browser-based rather than requiring the full application to be installed individually on each user's computer.
Specific deployment components may depend on the final technical architecture.
Can CRIS be used from different locations?
Subject to the organisation's approved deployment, security and access controls, authorised users can access the web platform from supported environments.
Does CRIS work on mobile devices?
The public CRIS website and product interface should be responsive.
Individual workflows may be more practical on larger screens depending on the amount of information involved.
Which browsers does CRIS support?
Supported browser requirements should be published as part of the production technical documentation for the relevant release.
Is CRIS a cloud application?
The final deployment architecture determines the approved hosting model.
The public website should not make a more specific hosting commitment than the actual customer deployment supports.
Can executives use CRIS without going into individual claims?
Yes.
Executive views are intended to summarise important performance and management signals while allowing authorised users to investigate further where necessary.
Can managers drill into a number?
The objective is to allow important management results to lead toward the underlying detail rather than becoming isolated dashboard numbers.
Available drill-down depends on the relevant module and data.
Can we build our own reports?
Reporting capability will depend on the CRIS release, modules and configuration.
Standard and role-specific reporting can be provided, with broader reporting capabilities evolving with the platform.
Can CRIS compare periods?
Where the necessary historical data is available, CRIS can support period comparison and trend analysis.
Can CRIS identify unusual patterns?
CRIS STATS is intended to help identify variation, unusual observations, distributions and trends.
An anomaly should prompt investigation rather than automatically being treated as proof that something is wrong.
Can our security team review CRIS before we buy?
Yes.
Security and technical review should be part of appropriate enterprise procurement.
Can CRIS complete a security questionnaire?
Formal security questionnaires should be answered based on the actual CRIS architecture, controls and approved deployment evidence.
They should not be answered from unsupported marketing claims.
Can we review CRIS before signing a contract?
Yes.
The website, product information, demonstrations and relevant evaluation materials can help buyers understand the platform before entering a customer agreement.
Does the public website form part of our customer agreement?
No.
Public website content helps explain CRIS.
The signed customer agreement, order documentation and applicable commercial and deployment terms govern the customer relationship.
Can we request a demonstration?
Yes.
A CRIS demonstration can be arranged around the revenue-cycle problem or management need the organisation is trying to understand.
Does CRIS guarantee that we will recover revenue?
No.
CRIS can help identify, investigate, manage and evidence revenue-cycle issues.
Actual financial outcomes depend on many factors, including the underlying circumstances, payer decisions, contractual arrangements, source data and action taken by the organisation.
Does CRIS automatically fix every denial or underpayment?
No.
CRIS can improve visibility, analysis and operational control.
Some issues still require human investigation, payer communication, documentation, appeal or another business action.
Will CRIS tell us exactly how much money we are losing?
CRIS can identify and analyse financial exposure based on the information and rules available.
A suspected exposure should not automatically be treated as confirmed loss.
Validation and reconciliation matter.
Does more data automatically mean better intelligence?
No.
Good intelligence depends on relevant, understandable and sufficiently reliable information.
Poor data can produce poor conclusions no matter how sophisticated the software appears.
What happens if we need help?
Customer support arrangements depend on the applicable CRIS plan and commercial agreement.
Support may include areas such as:
- Product assistance
- Configuration questions
- Issue investigation
- Technical support
- Implementation support
- Administration guidance
Can support staff see our information?
Support and administrative access should be controlled according to the approved production architecture and access standards.
Access should not simply exist because someone works for the platform provider.
How do we contact CRIS?
For general, commercial, security or demonstration enquiries, use the CRIS Contact page.
Do not use public contact channels to submit patient information or production claims data.
Still deciding whether CRIS fits?
Start with the problem, not the software.
You do not need to know which CRIS module you need before contacting us.
Tell us what is difficult to see, explain or control today.
That is enough to start the conversation.
“We cannot tell whether payers are paying us correctly.”
“Our denials keep repeating and we do not know why.”
“Management cannot see what is happening in A/R.”
“We have reports, but nobody knows who should act on them.”
“We have data in several systems and cannot reconcile it.”
“We can identify problems but struggle to prove whether they were resolved.”
Have a question that is specific to your organisation?