Whether you’re a provider looking for a better way to handle financial processes or a patient wanting a better payment experience, automated revenue cycle management and billing are vital to the continuity of the healthcare industry. It’s also the source of reliable money flow that drives the delivery and innovation of care.
Keep reading to discover why automated RCM matters in any practice, as well as learn more about claim denial management, patient collections and more!
What Can Automated Revenue Cycle Management Do For You?
Whether it’s when a new appointment is scheduled or during a post discharge evaluation, your practice should track all transactional data and stay up to date with billing best practices that both alleviate staff pain points as well as streamline patient payment experiences. With the right RCM tools, you will have access to data-driven workflows, automated engagement and interactive reporting, all of which allow you to optimize collections, stabilize revenue and generate more profitability.
Here are a few ways technology-enabled revenue cycle management can benefit your practice’s bottom line:
- Save time. Streamline processes, from pre-registration to tracking appointments to payment reminders to payors’ engagement on claims.
- Avoid redundancy. Detect errors quickly, so that they can be rapidly corrected. Less errors also means decreased denials and increased cash flow.
- Lower costs. Reduce operational costs and prevent excessive staff overhead.
- Improve patient satisfaction. Simplify patient payment experiences by offering better flexibility and increased price transparency – all from one secure place that helps manage healthcare reimbursements and payments.
- Reduce administrative burden. Expedite collections and give your staff time to focus on delivering quality care.
What Challenges Arise When RCM Is Not Automated?
Without effective RCM policies and procedures, healthcare organizations can’t reliably offer quality patient care or sustain financial solvency—which can be a risky proposition as well as leave you at certain disadvantages.
- Inefficient collections. Manual data entry and convoluted claim management can drain your staff. If your practice doesn’t have the time or the resources to proactively accrue patient revenue, you may be forced to go with less-than-reliable third-party collection agencies.
- Above-average rate of denials. Denials of claims are the main cause of lost revenue, which are payments any practice can’t afford to lose.
- Cumbersome workload. Without automated RCM, you may need to spend money on extensive training or hire additional staff members to handle some administrative issues that a billing software could address automatically.
These are just a few problem areas, but the point is clear: foregoing intuitive RCM tools can have an alarming negative impact on how your practice operates both clinically and financially. Click here to explore some new ledger strategies and discover how to streamline certain billing processes!
Why Claim Denial Management is Critical
While 90% of claim denials are preventable, often they are due to incorrect or missing information, which is why you need to make sure you’re filing clean claims that are accurate and properly coded. If you supply clean claims with all the necessary details to insurers, you are not only saving your practice from potential lost revenue but are more likely to receive payments after the first submission, rather than waste time going back and forth. That’s why effectively preventing claim denials can mean the difference between profitability and failure in any healthcare practice, especially when the right technology isn’t set in place.
In addition to automated revenue cycle management, business intelligence and analytics empowers valuable insights into your practice’s performance, which may identify patterns in financial trends, determine strategic KPIs, help recover lost revenue as well as monitor fluctuations in profit or productivity.
Revenue Cycle Management Best Practices
From large hospital facilities to small clinics, every healthcare organization should implement the following best practices in order to reduce your DSO (days sales outstanding) and foster financial growth.
- Increase the amount of data collected upfront. Don’t wait! Get as much information as possible as soon as possible (i.e. when any patient first seeks care).
- Develop your approach to software. Whether it be a single, unified system for practice management and billing or using outsourced RCM, either will assist in automating workflows and gaining substantial efficiencies.
- Enforce standards for collecting patient payments. Whether you collect from the patient at the time of service or even before, doing so consistently keeps your practice’s money flowing.
- Track claims throughout their entire lifecycle. Proactively verify insurance as the first step to ensure accurate billing and track claims from submission to payment.
Ready to leverage the power of automated revenue cycle management? Request a demo. We’d be happy to demonstrate the difference our platform can make in not only your practice’s financial operations but also your staff’s work-life balance as well as how patients make payments and manage their accounts.
