Do you want to improve your operations and make it more efficient? Are you hoping this investment will maximize your revenue?
In a recent survey result, about 17.5% of small to mid-size practice incurred operating losses in their revenue per physician. This percentage suggests methods need to focus on operational costs and processes to grow their revenues.
But how do you increase the efficiency of your healthcare revenue cycle? First, what is a healthcare revenue cycle?
What is the Healthcare Revenue Cycle?
The Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) defines the revenue cycle as comprising “all your administrative and clinical functions that contribute to the capture, management, and collection of patient service revenue.”
Your revenue cycle could look like the image above, according to the Oregon Health and Science University: Source: Revenue Cycle, OHSU Patient Business Services, accessed 08 March 2019.
If you want to improve on any of the following processes, you need to tackle each step:
- Scheduling and pre-registration
- Point of service registration counseling collections
- Encounter utilization review and case management
- Charge capture and coding
- Claim submission
- Third-party follow up
Remittance processing and rejections - Payment posting and appeals and collections
What strategies can you do to increase your healthcare revenue cycle efficiency? RevCycle Intelligence reports there are three key strategies.
1. Automate and Automate Wisely
31% of providers still rely on manual processes, but you could save $8.5 annually if you automate your workflows according to this same report.
What does it do?
- Lower the burden on your staff
- Improve your workflow
- Lower labor cost and human errors
Find the right technology that meets your needs. Make sure it simplifies your processes and not add to it. Focus on making things simple for your patients.
For example, help them register faster with the use of smartphone technology, online scheduling, and patient access to the list of providers.
2. Focus on a Frontend Makeover
Do you suffer from tons of claim denials? You can prevent this when you automate your registration.
Automate prior authorizations, benefit verification, and patient registration to flow through the backend. You can free your staff and providers from doing these things so they can focus on giving service to your patients.
3. Improve Transparency
Provide the patient with cost estimates even before the visit, so they come prepared. Offer payment options they can afford.
Automate the billing process. Make payment easy. If they can pay with a click of the phone real time, you receive the payments faster.
Save them the trip to the post office to mail that invoice. Spare them the effort of looking for their checkbook and writing down that check. Less is more.
We Can Help
You can tap on technology to improve your systems. And the better news is, you don’t need to do this yourself.
Check our ultimate outsourcing cheatsheet for medical providers to learn more about outsourcing this vital improvement to your revenue cycle.
Want to learn more about improving your revenue cycle? At MedEffects, we give a FREE practice analysis to see where you’re bleeding revenue, wasting time and precious resources, and where the most improvement can be planned and executed.