How Can a Healthcare Organization Improve its Revenue Cycle?

Your practice must have the revenue to accomplish your mission to help care for patients and advance healthcare. Strong revenue cycle management processes help keep your practice’s finances in order so you can spend more time seeing patients. Don’t let revenue cycle management issues keep your practice from achieving its goals. Here is how to improve revenue cycle management at your practice today.

Identify Weaknesses in Revenue Cycle Management

Your practice management (EPM) system, such as NextGen, can help you identify weaknesses in your revenue cycle. For example, dashboards and reports like TempDev’s Revenue Cycle Dashboard NextGen EPM Report can show you key revenue cycle metrics all in one place. Tools like this dashboard help you keep track of accounts receivable by age, payments, adjustments, and claims denials. Armed with this data, your practice can identify common problems like incomplete documentation that may slow down payment.

You can also use your EHR system to identify coding and documentation issues. TempDev has several reports and dashboards to help you track coding practices by provider. For example, the Provider Executive Summary NextGen EPM Report lets you track coding habits, appointment statistics, payer mix, and accounts receivable aging by provider. You can also view efficiency metrics like charges and payments per visit. This provider-level data from your EHR and practice management system can help your practice target training and other resources to providers who struggle with coding and documentation.

Your practice should also examine your patient intake, coding, documentation, and billing workflows to identify areas for improvement. For example:

Improve Revenue Cycle Management Processes

Once you have identified weaknesses or roadblocks in your revenue cycle management, you can get started improving your processes. Workflow redesign can help your practice streamline coding, documentation, and billing processes without adding burdens to your staff. Involving your clinical and non-clinical staff in workflow redesign projects will help ensure that the new workflows address problem areas and fit your practice.

To reduce claim denials and payment delays, automate simple billing processes in your EHR and EPM system. Prior to check-in, you can automate insurance eligibility checks to ensure patients' information is up-to-date and the planned services are covered by their insurance plan. To improve provider coding during visits and ease biller workloads, your practice can develop a sophisticated claims library. With a robust claims library, your EHR and EPM system can automatically check coding and documentation for errors. This saves your medical billing specialists time and helps ensure clean claims and limited denials. Further, your EPM can work with your clearinghouse to automatically create and post files and receive electronic remittance advice (ERA) postings. This means your medical billing specialists will not need to submit electronic claims and check for payments, adjustments, and denials. This frees your billing staff to focus on more complex issues like working delayed or denied claims and improving workflows.

Consult with a Revenue Cycle Management Company

Revenue cycle management companies specialize in helping your practice improve your coding, billing, and financial workflows. A revenue cycle management company like TempDev’s TempBill can help your practice identify weaknesses in your current processes and suggest solutions. Redesigning revenue cycle workflows can help your practice get paid faster without adding additional burdens to clinical or billing staff.

TempDev’s experts can also help you automate simple billing tasks. And, with support to integrate your NextGen EHR and EPM system with your general ledger system, revenue cycle management companies can help your practice simplify financial workflows and reduce duplication. Finally, companies like TempDev can train your staff to use your EHR and EPM system more effectively to streamline coding, billing, and follow-up tasks.

Co-Source Revenue Cycle Management

If your practice is struggling to keep up with revenue cycle management, you can co-source with a revenue cycle management company. Your partner company will augment your medical billing staff to ensure sufficient coverage for coding and billing tasks. Co-sourcing is a great option for practices that need additional expertise in coding and billing that is difficult to recruit. Under this model, your staff and the consultants and billers from the revenue cycle management company work side-by-side in your office, ensuring a team approach. Revenue cycle management companies like TempBill can also work with your staff to improve your coding and billing processes. With flat-fee co-sourcing, you can increase your practice’s revenue without unknown, variable costs.

Get Temporary Staff to Help with Special Revenue Cycle Management Projects

Planned absences or special projects can make it difficult to keep up with everyday revenue cycle management tasks. Temporary staff augmentation can help you stay on track. For example, TempBill has trained NextGen medical billing specialists available to fill gaps in your billing staff. TempDev can also provide revenue cycle consultants, managers, and training support for your special projects so your medical billing specialists can focus on their core work.

How TempDev Can Help Your Practice Improve Revenue Cycle Management

With TempDev’s TempBill services, your practice can outsource or co-source revenue cycle management. You can also get support for temporary absences or special projects with TempBilll’s staff augmentation services. TempDev's medical billing consultants can also help your practice identify and correct revenue cycle problems.

Call us at 888.TEMP.DEV or contact us here for revenue cycle consulting and staff augmentation.