Healthcare providers benefit from increasing efficiency of their revenue cycle management process. An improved RCM process boosts cash flow ultimately maximising revenues. Most medical practices choose to outsource their RCM requirements to renowned RCM service providers, who ensure complete reimbursements.
The following are the ways that these third-party providers reduce the time taken to provide quality revenue cycle management services:
- Verifying Patient Details
It is necessary to double check patient demographic information and insurance coverage details to prevent claim denials due to information inaccuracies. RCM service providers ensure to check patient details on every patient visit to the physician thus preventing billing errors. If any information collected is incomplete or outdated, the medical billers contact patients resolve the issues.
- Effective Denial Management
Claims can be denied due to a variety of reasons, which can range from coding errors to other faults from the insurance providers end. The medical billers must understand the root cause of the claim denials and resolve those issues immediately. They must re-submit the claim within the submission deadline to ensure that the insurance provider receives the claim. Therefore, effective denial management decreases the turnaround time helping maximise revenues.
- Using Automation to Gain Efficiency
Third-party RCM service providers utilise various advanced automated tools to ramp up the RCM process. They use practice management software to effectively handle the financial data hence improving cash flow for the medical practice. These experienced service providers maintain electronic health records to document patient interactions. They also automate other RCM steps such as patient registration, insurance coverage verification, patient data analysis, automated claim submission etc. helping boost the speed of their revenue cycle management services.
- Maintaining a Sound Financial Infrastructure
The payment systems maintained must be seamlessly integrated with the healthcare provider’s EMR or EHR. If it is not well-integrated, transferring patient and financial data onto the new formats upon installation of different payment systems will become tedious to carry out. This would decrease the efficiency of the RCM process. To avoid deterioration of RCM process efficiency, established third-party providers equip themselves with reliable financial infrastructure that enables frictionless revenue cycle management services.
- Planning Payment Collections
Prior planning of how the patient would pay their dues helps the medical practice to collect the payments owed without delays. Renowned RCM providers plan out the payment collection with the patients during pre-registration stage. Pre-planning of payments also gives an estimate to the patient of the costs that need to be covered by them after their insurance provider has paid their part. This can help in saving a lot of time in recovering outstanding amount.
- Providing Patients with Flexible Payment Methods
Providing patients with convenient payment modes is necessary to prevent payment delays. Lack of payment options is the reason for losing out on revenues even when the patients are ready to pay their dues. To prevent cash flow disruptions in such scenarios, third-party RCM provide the option of multiple payment methods for the patients such as debit card, savings account, credit card, payment by phone, online portals etc. This also truncates the time needed to get back dues.
- Tracking the KPIs
Key Performance indicators help gain an insight on the efficiency of the revenue cycle management process. These indicators include, number of A/R days, rate of payment collection, denial rate etc. Comparing these performance indicators with the other competitors to set the benchmarks can help improve the speed of the RCM process
While each of these above-mentioned steps are important in reducing the time for effective RCM management, monitoring and auditing the above-mentioned ways time-to-time is equally important for ensuring timely reimbursements consistently.
