Boost Revenue Cycle Accounts Receivable with Your Practice Management

Your integrated EHR and EPM system is more than scheduling software connected to electronic patient records. It is also a powerful revenue cycle management tool that can improve your practice finances. Your practice management system can even help you boost your revenue cycle accounts receivable performance by reducing days in A/R and bad debt.

Here’s how to improve your financial performance with help from your practice management system.

Monitor Your Revenue Cycle Accounts Receivable    

Most practice management systems have user-friendly tools like analytics, dashboards, and reports to help you keep track of your revenue cycle. With these tools, you can get an overview of your revenue cycle performance, including days in A/R by payer, claims denials, and payments and charges.

Your practice management system can help you track key A/R metrics, including total A/R, payment lag days, and A/R aging. While total A/R can give you an overall sense of A/R performance, A/R by age can help you identify payers or patient accounts over 90 or 120 days outstanding. Your practice should aim for 50 days or less in A/R, with a goal to collect most payments within 30-40 days.

Practice management systems can also help you keep track of your revenue cycle. You can view payments and charges by payer, including self-pay, to identify any issues with slow payments or denied claims. You can also track claims denials by reason to improve billing practices. If your practice has issues with bad debt or a low payments-to-charges ratio, you can track those metrics in your practice management system to identify problems and see whether training or other solutions help improve your performance.

Identify and Fix Accounts Receivable Revenue Cycle Problems

Your electronic practice management (EPM) system can increase your revenue and make your practice more efficient. Keeping track of your revenue cycle's accounts receivable will help your practice identify and fix problems to improve your financial performance. For example, you can identify slow payers and determine whether your billing practices are causing payment delays. You can implement claim edits to identify these issues and auto-fix or stop the claims from going out before you fix the issues. By having clean claims come out of your practice management system to your clearinghouse, you will reduce your days in A/R since payers are more likely to not deny them. You can address problems like frequent billing errors and get paid more quickly through training and workflow redesign.

Your practice management system also helps you identify and fix problems in your appointment workflow that can negatively affect your revenue cycle. Incorrect payer information, missed appointments, appointments with no corresponding charges, missed patient collections opportunities, and poor provider coding waste time and reduced revenue. Performing insurance verification by automatically running payer eligibility checks is a simple way to prevent eligibility denials. With tools like TempDev’s NextGen EPM Provider Executive Summary and Revenue Cycle Dashboard, you can see patterns in appointments and coding. This helps you identify workflow improvements like appointment reminders for patients and coding flags for providers. You can also target training to providers to improve coding and reduce billing errors.

Your practice management system can also streamline workflows for your billing and financial staff. When staff work A/R, they can struggle to identify accounts to prioritize. Your practice management system can help by keeping track of A/R aging, payer type, and past success in initiating payment. This information helps your staff plan their work and makes the volume of A/R work more predictable. Your practice management system should also have a way to automate accounts receivable follow-up tasks to help guide your medical billing staff towards reducing your A/R.

Improve Patient Satisfaction While Reducing Your Days in Accounts Receivable

In a 2020 survey, over 80 percent of customers said they would prefer electronic payments to healthcare providers. And over 90 percent said they had been surprised by a medical bill in 2019. Making payments easy and predictable for patients can increase patient satisfaction while improving your A/R performance and revenue cycle.

Your EPM system has tools to help your practice provide price transparency and easy bill payment. For example, the NextGen EPM version 6.2021.1 includes a new cost estimation feature to help patients know their liability for services and procedures in advance. And the NextGen Patient Portal lets patients view and pay their bills online. Patients can even check estimated copayments when making an appointment, reducing confusion during check-in.

How TempDev Can Help Boost Your Revenue Cycle Accounts Receivable Performance

TempDev has developed NextGen EPM Dashboards, Business Intelligence solutions, and Reports designed to help you monitor and manage your revenue cycle and accounts receivable performance:

TempDev can also help you create custom tools to meet the specific needs of your practice.

Call us at 888.TEMP.DEV or contact us here to boost your revenue cycle accounts receivable performance.