If you search the internet for advice on how to manage the revenue cycle in your medical practice, you will find a wealth of resources. While revenue cycle management is critical and a basic component of running a successful clinic, we believe you should go a little higher in terms of revenue cycle optimization. Without adding any additional patient appointments to your schedule, maximizing your collections as a % of total billings, reducing refused and rejected claims, and improving your capacity to collect on patient balances may drastically impact your overall income.
We’ll go over some best practises for improving your RCM for the most efficient and lucrative practice possible in this three-part blog series.
Build an Interoperable System as a Best Practice
The revenue cycle is only a small element of the wider healthcare IT ecosystem. While it plays an important role in your capacity to collect income, it is far from the only area where you should have optimal technology. Creating an interoperable system that exchanges patient, clinical, and operational data at all points can significantly boost your income. You and your team will be compelled to build manual methods to transmit data across systems if there is no interoperability.
Managing RCM: one of the most difficult tasks is weeding through the plethora of solutions that claim to provide some level of interoperability but in fact just provide a patchwork of hastily-built software APIs that attempt to connect various systems. At the end of the day, these systems generally need a significant amount of manual labor, or workarounds devised by your employees to exchange data between systems that weren’t designed for interoperability—both of which are wasteful and can lead to errors.
Starting with a system that is already totally interoperable is the greatest approach to optimize your whole RCM. If you think you have to get the biggest and most costly system merely to obtain all the bells and whistles, this might be intimidating for a small practice. Instead, look for a software company (such as GoDoctor) that offers a modular solution that you may expand over time. Start with the fundamentals, such as an electronic health record (EHR), scheduling, practice management software, and medical coding and billing software. Then, if required, add on features like a patient portal, appointment reminders, reputation management, telemedicine, and more.
