We believe there’s a lot of room for improvement in healthcare revenue cycle management. Each day, we hear from practice owners or managers who have been handling RCM on their own. It doesn’t take long for them to become frustrated and overwhelmed with constant changes and challenges. RCM is a notoriously challenging topic in the healthcare industry, so it’s no surprise so many practices struggle with doing it on their own.
In addition to outsourcing your RCM services to the pros, there are many steps you can take within your own practice to improve healthcare RCM. We’re going to tell you all about those in this post.
Common Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Challenges
Before we explore some of those steps for improving healthcare revenue cycle management, let’s first go over some of the common challenges it poses.
- Accurate billing and precise coding
- Ensuring strict compliance standards are met
- Inefficiency during every point of the revenue cycle
- Being slowed down by excessive paperwork
- Trouble collecting payments in a timely manner
- Credentialing
How to Improve Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management
Outsource your RCM services
The first and most effective best practice for improving healthcare revenue cycle management is outsourcing your RCM services.
In doing so, virtually all of the challenges associated with RCM become the responsibility of RCM service providers. These professionals have the experience and know-how to overcome these challenges, making your entire practice more efficient.
Not to mention, when these tasks and challenges are taken care of for you? Then you can get back to putting all of your energy into patient care!
Automation is key for healthcare revenue cycle management
Another can’t-miss best practice involves automating as much as you can in the billings and collections processes at your practice. When you automate these steps, it cuts down on the time it takes to complete them, as well as the possibility of errors. When billings and collections are automated, you can also reap the rewards of faster collection times!
We talk more about healthcare revenue cycle management in this post: How to Improve Revenue Cycle Management.
In it, we include this list some of the most beneficial workflow automation systems for healthcare practices:
- Electronic confirmation of scheduled patient appointments
- Verifying insurance and benefits prior to a patient’s appointment
- Verifying and correcting patient information
- Ability to capture patient’s credit card information for processing after claims adjudicate
- Updating outdated or incorrect information
- Automatically adding coded comments
- Migrating patient files
Track and benchmark revenue cycle performance
Before you can effectively improve the healthcare revenue cycle, you first need to be clear on the specific challenges you’re facing. We’ve already covered a list of common RCM challenges—but some are more likely to affect your practice than others. To get clear about the specific challenges your practice faces, you’ll need to look at the data.
Are you seeing a lot of denied claims? Is your time to collect constantly increasing? Does your staff say the amount of paperwork they face is frustrating and overwhelming?
Depending on what the data (and your staff) tell you, you can track and benchmark revenue cycle performance to see what’s working and what’s not.
How We Can Help
RevStream was established in 2016 with a bold vision in mind: offering the most comprehensive and effective revenue cycle management for the healthcare industry. We will bring our expertise and experience to your practice so you can watch your healthcare revenue cycle management improve seemingly right before your eyes.
With more than 20 years of combined high-level experience in the Department of Labor revenue cycle, RevStream co-founders Johnette Thomas and Lauren Eggleston have firsthand knowledge of industry trends and an invaluable Revenue Cycle Management toolbox they eagerly share with their clients.
Click here to learn more about us. Or, visit this link to read about our RCM services.
We look forward to hearing from you!