6 Reasons to Outsource Your Revenue Cycle Management
Are you struggling to manage your healthcare practice’s revenue cycle? If so, you’re not alone. With an ever-changing landscape of insurance requirements, complex coding rules and the need for quick turnaround times on patient accounts, managing a successful revenue cycle is becoming increasingly difficult for many medical practices.
The good news is that outsourcing your Revenue Cycle Management can provide the expertise and efficiency needed to maximize billing accuracy and increase profitability, without sacrificing patient satisfaction.
In this article, we explore the benefits of RCM and the top 6 reasons why outsourcing your RCM could be the solution that propels your practice forward.
What is Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)?
Revenue cycle management, also known as RCM, is the process of managing a healthcare provider’s financial transactions with patients and insurance companies. This includes billing, coding, and collections.
RCM involves the systematic tracking and analysis of revenue generated from patients throughout their entire care journey. This meticulous process starts when appointments are scheduled and continues until the final payment is made, covering the total cost of care. ote a culture of continuous improvement and helps teams align their efforts toward shared goals.
Why Should Practices Prioritize RCM Over Billing Alone?
Billing and coding play crucial roles in the process of revenue cycle management, but they are not the sole components. By taking a comprehensive approach to the revenue cycle, healthcare practices can reap the following advantages:
Improved cash flow
Implementing Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) can optimize cash flow for practices by reducing the payment turnaround time for services provided. By streamlining the billing and collections process, practices can ensure prompt payment and prevent cash flow challenges.
Reduced Denials and Rejections
Practices can effectively minimize the number of denied or rejected claims by proactively managing the entire revenue cycle. This can be accomplished by ensuring accurate and timely claim submissions and promptly addressing any errors or issues that may arise.
Increased Revenue
Practices can enhance their revenue and profitability by optimizing the revenue cycle. This can be accomplished by identifying areas of revenue loss or missed opportunities and implementing targeted strategies to rectify these issues.
Enhanced Patient Satisfaction
Efficient management of the revenue cycle can result in increased patient satisfaction. By optimizing the billing and collections procedures and delivering precise and transparent details regarding insurance coverage and expenses, healthcare practices can enhance the overall patient experience.
Meeting Regulatory Requirements
Healthcare practices are obligated to adhere to multiple regulatory requirements, such as HIPAA and billing regulations. A key aspect of compliance involves prioritizing RCM. By doing so, healthcare facilities can fulfill these requirements, mitigating the risk of incurring expensive penalties and fines.
6 Reasons to Outsource Your RCM
RCM can be extremely time-consuming, complex, and requires constant updates to adhere to ever-changing regulations. As a result, many medical practices are left confused and with questions.
Outsourcing to a RCM team allows your staff to focus on providing quality patient care rather administrative tasks. Here are 6 reasons why outsourcing your RCM could be the smartest business decision for your practice:
- Focus on Patient Care
One of the primary reasons to outsource your RCM is to free up your team’s time to focus on quality patient care. RCM is time-consuming and complex, and taking time to process and manage claims can take away valuable time from other important responsibilities. By outsourcing, your team can focus on providing patients with quality care that will improve outcomes.
- Difficulty Ensuring Regulatory + Payor Compliance
Healthcare regulations are always changing, and it can be difficult to keep up. Failing to adhere to compliance can result in serious consequences such as heavy fines, loss of accreditation, and even potential lawsuits. By outsourcing your RCM, you’ll have peace of mind knowing that experts are dedicated to staying up-to-date on the latest regulations and payor requirements.
- Employee Turnover/ Labor Shortages
Staff shortages, attrition, and employee turnover rates can be high in medical practices. Hiring and training new personnel for RCM roles is time-consuming and expensive. Outsourced billing service providers offer relief from this burden. It allows healthcare providers to scale their business and remove the need to recruit and train in-house staff continually.
- Cash Collection Speed and Accuracy
Automating your RCM processes can help increase cash flow and reimbursements more quickly and efficiently. This can save your practice money by ensuring greater accuracy and reducing claim rejection rates.
- Reduce Costs
In-house billing involves a lot of expenses such as staff training, calling for insurance verification, re-working claim duplicates, software and hardware expenditures, and salaries.
Outsourcing to an RCM provider significantly reduces these expenses. Your billing service provider handles billing and coding processes, leaving you more time to focus on core competencies, and saving you considerable amounts of money.
- You Want to Save Time
Manual entry, claim re-work, and claim follow-up tasks not only take up a lot of time and resources, but also delay payments. Outsourcing to a dedicated billing service provider with automated processes frees up staff time, allowing them to focus on their core competencies and improve overall practice efficiency.
Outsource Your RCM to DrChrono
Managing RCM in-house requires a significant investment of time and resources that may interfere with your ability to provide exceptional patient care. Outsourcing your RCM to DrChrono enables your practice to maintain income stability and avoid the costs and complexities of managing billing and coding in-house.
DrChrono’s RCM team of dedicated billing experts, in-house coding compliance officers, and certified medical coders handle the complete lifecycle of your medical claims. By leveraging this expertise, you can expect enhanced clean claim rates, swift denial turnaround, and improved cash flow.
DrChrono’s RCM services strive to enhance practice profitability with an impressive 96% clean claim rate. We provide consistent workflows, ongoing claims monitoring, and reduced administrative tasks, to allow you to practice medicine, not administration.
Contact a DrChrono Billing Expert today for a free RCM ROI analysis!