5 Tips to Improve Your RCM

You may not have gotten into healthcare to make a lot of money, but without proper revenue cycle management, you’ll find it very difficult to maintain smooth, efficient operations and help your patients. That’s why it’s important to keep your RCM process as free from problems as possible, and there are a few things you can do to ensure this happens.

1 – Improve Your Backend

You may not think of it much because RCM systems are in the background, but it pays in efficiency and saved time to make sure that payment management is as efficient as possible. Do you have contingencies for mailed payments and returned mail? If you use a pay-by-phone system, is your collection mechanism up to the task? Make sure that the financial apparatus you have in place to handle the various aspects of RCM are doing the job as efficiently as possible. If anything is complicating your process or slowing you down, revisit and reevaluate.

2 – Collect Payments ASAP

Time is money, and the more time you have to process a payment, the more money you can potentially save. If you can, educate your patients, and explain the benefits of paying at the start or just prior to the appointment rather than after an appointment has concluded. Being honest and transparent with your patients about expenses and where their money goes can help this process.

3 – Consolidate As Many Systems As You Can

If you can find a way to seamlessly integrate your E/M/H/R with your payment systems, accounting systems and other financial infrastructure, you’re on your way to good RCM that will help in a lot of ways. Needing to transpose data into other formats or systems impedes time and isn’t efficient. You can make financial life easier, simpler and less intrusive by streamlining as much of it as you can into a singular process.

4 – Provide Different Payment Methods

If you only have one or two payment methods, you are slowing things down for yourself and potentially making it more difficult for your patients to successfully transact with you, even when they do have the money available. Make sure that systems for online payment, medical savings accounts, payment by phone, debit card, credit card and others are available to your patients to use. The more methods you have available, the faster you’ll receive and process those payments.

5 – Be Patient-centric

While it’s obviously important to have good RCM practices in place to efficiently handle finances, first and foremost, clinics, hospitals and other healthcare providers are about helping people. And as long as you focus on providing quality treatment to your patients and helping them to live healthy lives, you will be working towards the most important cornerstone of RCM, bringing in revenue that needs to be managed. If you’re not providing quality care, if your systems are alienating your patients, then that reduction in revenue is going to hurt far more than not streamlining your RCM enough.

By following these five tips, you might not completely eliminate the complexity of RCM, but you’ll be in a better, more efficient place to handle it. That’s important, especially as more incoming changes to payment and the AHCA mean more adapting and evolving will be required.

Want to know how Rev-Ignition can help in improving your financial processes? Don’t let paperwork and payment be a bottleneck in your operation. Let us integrate a tailored RCM solution for your problems today, contact us at sales@rev-ignition.com or (844) 297-9944