We just made it through another daylight savings time! Gone are the dark mornings and the sunsets that seem to happen while you’re still at work! (As an aside, did you know daylight savings was enacted in 1918 to conserve fuel needed for electric power in wartime?) I’m always relieved when the time change happens and I’m able to enjoy the outdoors and sunshine in the evenings.
Daylight Savings also signals the approach of St. Patrick’s Day. It’s the perfect time to don your brightest green shirt, find your four-leaf clover, and join the parade. But in the midst of the St. Patty’s Day festivities, it’s worth noting that when it comes to your healthcare organization, you don’t need to follow the rainbow to reach the pot of gold. You don’t need luck, just strategy, to achieve a healthy revenue cycle—to prove it, our recent webinar offers tips to solve your toughest AR problems:
1. Review your payer contracts and reap the rewards. Dig in to review and compare payers’ prices and terms; use administrative and clinical data to seek more favorable contracts. Evaluate payers, considering which ones make the most sense to do business with, and use these insights to streamline the number of payers you work with. This is especially important as you consider participating in value-based care initiatives and taking on at-risk contracts.
2. Tweak your financial clearance process and produce positive returns. Since patients are shouldering larger portions of their healthcare bills, giving them upfront insights about what they’ll owe is key to improving your bottom line. Improve the process for verifying:
- Insurance coverage
- Benefits
- Eligibility
- Responsibility, including unmet deductibles
By arming them with this information before service is rendered, you can keep patients in the know and work with them to make arrangements for payment while they’re in the office.
3. Optimize your tech and performance. Practice management solutions can help you streamline revenue cycle processes and greatly increase staff efficiency. The right practice management solution should help you automate:
- Insurance coverage and benefits eligibility verification
- Code collection for charge capture
- Code scrubbing
- Payments
For best results, ensure your EHR, practice management solution, and claims clearinghouse work well together. Also consider using a full-service claims clearinghouse to streamline the entire claims process from claims submission to denial and appeal management.
Make your own luck: You don’t need to track a rainbow to improve your revenue cycle management; a few process tweaks and robust technology offerings will bring your practice closer to achieving its financial objectives this spring.
Get more tips on how to improve your revenue cycle — and ensure your denials are decreasing and cash is flowing as green as the Chicago River! Read our ebook 11 top causes of denials (and how to fix them).
