Dealing with reduced revenue, while struggling to keep a hospital or clinic in tune with reimbursement regulations is a slippery slope many providers face when in-house revenue cycle management is used. As hospitals and clinics understand that they can no longer ignore reducing revenue and other warning signs, we look at major ones that are common over several healthcare practices and how the answer to them is outsourcing revenue practices.
Costs associated with hiring, paying and providing benefits to staff manning an in-house revenue cycle practice are a continual drain on hospitals and clinics. These costs also increase over the years as salaries and benefits are hiked, and as revenue shrinks they can become too much for a hospital to handle. Compared to this, outsourcing revenue cycle management to a third-party service provider brings a lot of cost savings. These savings increase drastically when a tried and tested provider is hired, as they have the skills to get billing done faster and provide better accuracy rates.
Reasons why revenue shrinks are many but several stem from mistakes made during medical billing and coding. The switch to value-based care from free-for-service is also expected to bring revenue down in the next few years. Putting in place methods of dealing with falling revenue are never clear-cut, but providers have learnt that outsourcing gives them access to experts who can analyze shortfalls and handle revenue cycle management efficiently.
Healthcare providers are increasingly, having to spend more time handling revenue cycle management and less on delivering care to patients. Especially when physicians get bogged down in paperwork and data management it is a major indicator that more efficient revenue practices need to be used, as delivering high quality care is a corner stone of the upcoming shift to a value-based healthcare system.
Changing medical reimbursement regulations and the recent implementation of ICD-10 can leave in-house staff in disarray. Outsourcing revenue cycle management to a competent provider ensures that the impact of regulatory changes is minimized.
Technologies and software used in medical billing are constantly being updated and staff members need to be thoroughly trained to use them. Additionally, when you are hiring new employees to fill vacancies, most people must be trained even though they are experienced medical coders, since they will not be familiar with all EMR/EHR software used.
Opening a new practice is riddled with problems and doctors frequently get bogged down in billing issues which can be efficiently sidestepped by adopting outsourcing from day one.
Finding a good partner to outsource revenue cycle management can be a daunting task, but hospitals are realizing that it is a better option to partner with an expert such as OutsourceRCM compared to dealing with it in-house.