How to Manage Healthcare Revenue Cycle Process Efficiently?
Healthcare revenue cycle management is undoubtedly, the backbone of your medical practice. It is the process you conduct which starts from registering your patients in your records, giving them the treatment they need, billing their payer (or them if they don’t have any coverage), and getting reimbursement for your treatment.
This is important because if your revenue cycle management system is not in optimal condition, you will lose a lot of your revenue through unidentified leakages, excessive expenditures, and higher-than-necessary costs. On the other hand, if you optimize your healthcare revenue cycle management and implement best practices out there, most likely you’ll see a considerable amount of revenue increase that can help you sustain your practice, focus on your patients, and thrive in this challenging economy.
Although the healthcare revenue cycle challenges you can face vary from practice to practice, some can be commonly found in most medical practice management.
This is one of the most problematic behaviors which gets widely practiced among practitioners. Sometimes the administration makes small (and sometimes obvious) errors that cause significant hindrances in the RCM process. These errors are mostly about incorrectly filling out patient details. This includes their name’s spelling, contact number, address, email address, and other important data.
Although not a direct error, it plays a huge part in disturbing the RCM process. This step involves ineffective and insufficient communication among patients and practitioners. Sometimes patients don’t disclose their specific insurance package to the practitioners because they were not asked to do so. On the other hand, sometimes practitioners forget to ask for critical information which can cause problems in the billing process in the future.
As weird as it sounds here, procrastination is considered one of the major causes of revenue cycle disturbance. And that’s because practitioners tend to delay processing payments, asking for information, processing denied claims, etc. With a somewhat careless attitude, practitioners face a considerable amount of revenue loss in the form of missing out on deadlines, getting claim denials, processing them again (which causes extra money), etc.
Now as critical as these negligence may sound, they can be easily eradicated by revising the way you manage your revenue cycle. So here are the top 5 healthcare revenue cycle tips you can start applying in your RCM process to make it more efficient:
The first step that lies in (and can be fixed right away) is to analyze how you take in a patient’s data and put it into your records. Some critical data input processes like Appointment Scheduling also fall under this category.
So to minimize the chances of errors in this domain, you can set up a way where your patients can make appointments themselves. This way they will put in their information to the best of their knowledge. This reduces the chances of errors and seamlessly helps you smoothen up your medical practice management from the initial steps.
One more thing that specifically contributes to improving your healthcare revenue cycle management is to send appointment reminders to them so they can remember they have to see you in the upcoming time. This way you can minimize no-shows.
When the first part is all well done, you can focus on revising your healthcare coding techniques by applying more accuracy and precision while assigning diagnosis codes to relative diseases/treatments. If the coding errors that cause claim denials are not very frequent, you can fix them by asking your staff to be more careful and precise during coding. However if medical coding errors are a regular thing, you might want to consider giving proper training to your medical administrative staff about how to do proper coding for the services you provide. That’s how fixing your healthcare coding methods can amplify your reimbursements and help you make the most out of your practice.
Everything runs at its best when they are processed through a system. Medical practice management is no exception and that’s its good to establish proper systems that can organize, streamline, and oversee all the processes involved in your revenue cycle management. This can include various revenue cycle management software, expert teams, applications, workflows, healthcare tools, etc. that help you manage your revenue stream.
Another use of such a system is that it can help you detect any problems, technical difficulties, or issues your patients face. This way you’ll get ahead in the system and will readily know of any upcoming problem and will be able to have tools to solve it.
Establishing systems is also a prime way to regular your revenue stream, fix any leakages, and maximize reimbursements.
A denial management team helps you understand the “root cause” of what makes your claim denied in the first place. This is followed by setting up a unique system that consists of different strategies and tactics you can use to fix your errors.
One of the easiest, and most reliable ways to manage your healthcare revenue cycle management is to outsource it to a company that is a field expert in managing it.
