July 23, 2021
Leave It to The Professionals: How Outsourcing Your Revenue Cycle Management Can Benefit Your Healthcare Practice
What exactly do you get with revenue cycle management? In a previous article, we discussed what revenue cycle management is, why it’s so hard to do on your own when you’re trying to manage a busy practice, and how your practice can benefit from the services of a revenue cycle management provider. In this article, we’ll explore in greater detail the exact functions of a revenue cycle management provider and walk through the particular services they offer to help healthcare practitioners save time, money, and hassle.
1. Healthcare Billing
Billing is one of the most time-consuming tasks for healthcare providers. You need to match your patient notes for the visit with the appropriate billing codes and then generate a bill for the patient and insurance company. You also need to send out the bills you generate and follow up on them.
Revenue cycle management providers can take care of all the billing for you. You just access an easy-to-use computer system that lets you quickly generate a bill after each visit. The input form provides checks that help you avoid making common coding errors or leaving out key information. You can then print a bill for the patient on the spot or send it by mail or email. Your billing system will also sync up with each insurance company’s preferred method of receiving your bills.
Once you input the details of each patient visit, your job is complete. Your billing service ensures that each bill gets issued and paid. When you receive payment, it automatically applies to the patient’s account and your accounting system.
2. Collections
Unpaid bills are par for the course in any medical practice. Patients may forget about their bill, not be able to pay, or even refuse to pay. Often, healthcare providers lose revenue that they could have gotten because no one in their office is tracking past-due accounts.
Your revenue cycle management provider can take care of all phases of collections. Most accounts will get resolved by sending reminder bills and making phone calls. These are not the harassing phone calls you might imagine when you think about collections and debt collectors. They are simply a polite reminder that the patient owes for a visit along with a request to settle their bill.
Some patients may need more time to pay or may be financially unable to pay the balance due. In line with guidelines you set, your revenue cycle management company can arrange payment plans, settle accounts, or charge off uncollectible debts.
3. Denial Management
Simply submitting a claim to a health insurance carrier doesn’t guarantee it will be approved or paid in full. Insurance companies often push back or deny claims outright. Most denials happen because of technicalities — either you coded something wrong or the insurance company wants a little more information.
With an improved healthcare billing system, you can avoid many of these technical issues from the start just by having a check in place to make sure you’re entering accurate and complete data. Your revenue cycle management provider will follow up on any denials and pursue them until they’re resolved. In some cases, you may need to pull some information from the patient’s file, but working with an RCM provider means you won’t get caught up in all the back-and-forth with the insurance claims department.
4. Patient Relationship Management
Patient relationship management goes hand in hand with healthcare billing. Just as you need to communicate about bills, you want to thank patients for their visits and payments, send reminders to schedule future appointments, and ask for customer feedback.
Some healthcare providers already use separate customer relationship management software. This is a cumbersome way to do business. It creates extra work transferring patient information and managing separate systems. An all-in-one solution lets you rely on one trusted partner for everything while keeping up with your patients efficiently.
5. IT Services
All aspects of modern healthcare practice management run on computers. Using computers means that software needs upgrading and hardware needs periodic replacing, And sometimes things just break. If you have a small practice, it makes little sense to have your own IT staff.
Your revenue cycle management provider can provide IT services. This includes making sure that you have all the equipment and software you need, as well as implementing required upgrades, patches, and repairs. And there will be someone on-call to help your staff fix any technology problems that come up during the day.
You can also take advantage of extra services such as web design. Integrating your website with your billing and practice management software allows your patients to access a portal where they can review their accounts and appointments online.
6. Staff Training
When you specialize in healthcare, it may be hard to train your staff on skills like bookkeeping. Even if a team member has prior experience, each practice and software system has slightly different ways of doing things.
Your revenue cycle management provider can teach a range of requirements, from basic use of the software to more in-depth training on how to perform back office tasks. This will give both you and your staff extra support to make sure everyone can do their job properly.
Talk to Advantrix
To learn more about revenue cycle management and related services, contact Advantrix today. We’re here to help you run your practice efficiently so you can focus on providing the best care to your patients.
Image Credits: Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash