Important Steps to Optimize the Revenue Cycle in Healthcare

Revenue cycle management has always been challenging for the healthcare IT industry. There is a need to optimize the healthcare revenue cycle management. Healthcare revenue cycle management is complex and comprises of front and back end functions that combine together to produce final healthcare payments. 

Adopting the ‘always open to learning’ attitude is the key to improve the healthcare revenue cycle management along with the application of these few useful steps:

Make patients go past the payment desk

The healthcare systems should educate and encourage their patients to make co-payments in advance to maintain a healthy relationship with the patient. When you reach out to a patient to inform them about the co-payments, you must be convincing and furnished with all the details. To offer additional convenience you can enable different modes of payments to your patients and ask them what they prefer. 

Setting up a physical registration process for payments can optimally help in collecting payments from patients in real-time. This simply means that before the patient walks in and registers themselves for a healthcare service they will have to go past the payment desk. To make the collection of payments more effective and feasible it is important that the provider accepts all credit cards to ensure everyone is able to make payments. 

Carefully examine processes and contracts for better management

It is important to immediately examine the contracts and look out for even the smallest discrepancies in the payments that may go unnoticed. Mostly small differences in the payments that providers overlook accumulate to contribute to a huge loss to the provider. To improve the revenue cycle it is important to keep an eye on every on-going process and to make sure everything is working well on a daily basis. 

It is understandable that it can be difficult to follow up with each and every on-going process with so many tasks being performed simultaneously. The intervention of technology can help you keep an eye on the daily tasks going on in your provider without any hassle. 

Consider AI intervention to reduce cost

The healthcare staff always has a flux of tasks to handle and perform in very less time. From data entry to following up with the patients regarding their financial obligations or even collecting the upfront each and every task is performed by the healthcare staff. Setting your staff free from the obligation of performing repeated, mundane tasks can not only improve their efficiency but will also enable them to focus on imperial tasks.

There are tasks that can proficiently be performed by the bots regardless of how frequently they need to be performed. Tasks like compiling associated reports and paper claims do not require human expertise and can be well performed by AI technology. Automating the repeated tasks will not only minimize the chances of errors but assure an uninterrupted performance. The bots do not get tired not do they need a break which means they can continually work night and day, unlike the human staff.

The intervention of the AI technology will enable you to assign complicated tasks to your team that only they can do the best. In a few days of adopting the automated system, you might not need the night shift crew anymore and can save the cost of hiring and paying them each month.

Synchronization between the front and back end revenue cycle management team

One of the major drawbacks of the healthcare industry is that each and every staff member is only aware and concerned about the task they perform. The front end staff doesn’t know at all what is happening at the back end and continues to carry out his function. Not to forget that the revenue cycle of the healthcare providers is completed only when both front and back end operations are fulfilled.

Optimal results can be obtained by ending the silo between the front and back end operations. Collaboration between the front and back end revenue cycle management staff, and physician billing service can help to improve the revenue cycle management of providers. The staff will get to understand the revenue cycle better when they’ll seamlessly work together to reduce cost and optimize output.

Besides the aforementioned practicable insights, the revenue cycle management in the healthcare industry can also become better by taking the following measures

• Enabling online payments
• Adopting the coding tools and process automation
• Concentrating on the efficient claim submission and denial management

Unfortunately, only a minor percentage of the providers take advantage of the emerging technology and physician billing service to enhance their revenue cycle management. The most still follow the aloof and conventional strategies in their billing and collection cycle and hence miss a major part of their revenue targets.