Saturday, 12 August 2017

The Case For Outsourced Revenue Cycle Management

By Betty Kennedy


Traditionally, medical billing processes have always required a specialized set of skills. In the last few years, however, the need to adapt to changing regulations has made it even harder for practitioners to achieve efficiency in revenue cycle management. As a result, more and more healthcare organizations are now opting to outsource the operation, as opposed to investing in an in-house department.

For all organizations, cash flow is key. Streamlining the revenue cycle time can significantly improve an entity's bottom line. But if you're constantly relying on your clinical staff to do the job, maintaining efficiency and profitability will prove virtually impossible. This is why you should look for a dedicated RCM partner to take care of the whole billing process.

Working with a reliable RCM firm allows a practice to benefit from a large team of dedicated, highly skilled experts. In most cases, these individuals will usually be integrated into the client organization's workforce. As a result, everyone is able to understand the business requirements of the partnership, besides having a good idea of what the overall objective is. Such a relationship could also allow an organization to make use of the expertise gained from other practices by the outsourcing firm.

The healthcare landscape is rapidly evolving, and medical billing hasn't been spared from the upheaval. Since payer rules, fee schedules and billing codes are all being modified constantly, it's easy to get lost in the confusion if you don't have everything figured out. Partnering with an RCM service provider can however give you the expertise to keep up with the changes and stay proactive to avoid being left behind.

On the face of it, entrusting an outside party with the management of your financial tasks seems highly risky, due to the lack of direct control. In practice, however, the fact that your service provider will be handling all back-end tasks means you'll have more room to look at the bigger picture, rather than the separate details. A good partner will also provide some elaborate analytic reports for deeper insight into certain areas. To say the least, outsourcing could actually improve visibility here, as opposed to hampering it.

Across most practices, a good number of staff members are usually pulled away from their primary roles whenever extra hands are needed in billing and coding. As experts will tell you, outsourcing the burden to an external provider can solve such staffing problems. Rather than invest in recruiting skilled workers for these crucial responsibilities, it would be much more effective to partner with a qualified external team.

Although most medical professionals try as much as they can to focus on patient care, it's virtually impossible to do so when burdened by the demands of billing issues. This is perhaps the biggest reason why more organizations should consider offloading the responsibility from their staff members. This would not only boost their morale, but patients will also benefit from excellent professional assistance as a result.

The steep increase in complexity over the recent past has made it rather difficult to ensure billing processes are properly handled. That said, outsourcing the task has been identified as the best solution for virtually all healthcare organizations. So think about the benefits you stand to gain by doing so; this will put you on the right track towards finding a good RCM partner.




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