The demand for quality PTs, OTs, and SLPs has left many rehabilitation clinics understaffed and struggling to meet business goals.
Staffing challenges affect all areas of your practice, from the front desk to your clinical team. When it comes to preserving and increasing your revenue, you need a highly trained and experienced billing team to ensure accurate coding and payment processing.
As one of the top challenges facing rehabilitation therapy providers, staffing issues have made it harder than ever for in-house teams to tackle the complexities of revenue cycle management (RCM). It may be time to consider three tools that can help your practice survive staffing shortages and boost profitability despite a challenging economy.
Automated EMR Tools to Counteract Staffing Shortages
These days, many electronic medical records (EMRs) offer integrated billing tools to help providers manage their revenue cycle more efficiently as well as mitigate staffing challenges. Billing tools or outsourced RCM services can help understaffed rehab therapy practices overcome issues such as high turnover, burnout, and more.
1. Automated Payment Tracking
Automated payment tracking technology makes it easier to manage claim tracking between patients, your practice, and insurance companies. This tool is a boon for any practice facing staffing shortages by eliminating the need for manual entry, reducing the manpower needed to follow up on claim and payment status, as well as minimizing the risk of errors.
On its own, this is already a powerful technology that can help providers save time and money, but when coupled with an integrated all-in-one EMR, automated payment tracking can also benefit your therapy and rehab practice by:
- Keeping providers educated on the status of their accounts receivable
- Ensuring payments are received in a timely manner
- Reducing the chances of lost claims and payments
- Boosting staff productivity and freeing up valuable resources
Additionally, this technology can provide helpful insights into financial trends, further helping providers understand the overall financial health of their practice and what changes can be made for more efficient RCM processes.
2. Claim Scrubbing Technology
Automated claim scrubbing is an invaluable RCM tool that can save providers time and money that might otherwise go towards error-prone manual processes. By automatically reviewing claims for medical coding errors before they are submitted, therapists are given the opportunity to quickly address any potential issues, avoid costly delays or rejections, and ensure claim accuracy.
To take it a step further, claim scrubbing tools also offer providers a real-time view of these automated processes, granting them better insight into the progress of their claims and the ability to take immediate action if necessary.
For organizations facing staffing issues, integrated automated claim scrubbing can completely replace manual claim review and claim resubmission. This not only frees up your employees to tackle other high-value tasks, but also allows for improved cash flow amid medical professional shortages. Seeking an electronic health record (EHR) system that offers automatic claim scrubbing as part of its RCM toolset can make a massive difference in your financial operations amid staffing shortages.
3. Automated Coding Solutions
Automated coding solutions allow providers to quickly and accurately generate medical billing codes based on their documentation while also reducing administrative paperwork and the burden on billing staff. Beyond the relief of lessening the workload on staff, this technology has revolutionized the way medical professionals record diagnoses and treatments, allowing them to increase the accuracy of their documentation, streamline the process of creating medical records, and eliminate the need for manual coding.
Additionally, automated coding solutions can detect and apply the most up-to-date codes and rules in real time, ensuring that claims are not only accurate, but compliant as well. What’s more, this automation technology can also help improve turnaround times, allowing providers to get paid faster, reducing the time it takes to process claims, and giving providers more opportunities to focus on providing quality patient care.
From medical coding to claim scrubbing and even to clinical documentation, automation technology is key to managing tough workloads and streamlining RCM in the face of staffing challenges.
Understaffed? Use Software to Pick Up the Slack
Overall, utilizing EMR tools to maximize revenue cycle management is a must for any healthcare organization that is facing staffing shortages. The question is, which practice management solution best serves the needs of your therapy and rehab organization?
With Raintree’s flexible all-in-one EMR solution, your staff can breathe easy with automation that can streamline existing processes and reduce daily workloads! Our practice management system goes beyond integrated billing tools, from our EHR designed for rehab therapy to patient engagement to business intelligence, our platform can be configured to perfectly meet the demands of your practice.
Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo with one of our experts today!
