Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) is the core strategy for your practice to track and collect revenue from the patients you treat. It isn’t just one step; it’s the entire cycle, from the moment the patient starts interacting with your office up until the revenue collection.
Having a defined RCM is critical to keeping your practice running smoothly with revenue to continue operation. However, even with it being a critical component of running a practice, mistakes can easily be made by practices of all sizes.
We’ll look at some of the most common mistakes and discuss how to avoid them so you aren’t missing any revenue.
Not Defining Your Process
Your RCM is the process that will bring in money for your practice. It’s not just the collection of money but steps throughout the entire interaction with the patient that will ensure you get the most out of the interaction with that patient from the beginning to the end.
Many practices we work with either do not have a specifically defined process for every step in the RCM or do not stick to the process they have defined 100% of the time.
It is critical to have a process for every step in the cycle, follow this process, and update it when you notice it isn’t performing as well as you’d like.
Not Optimizing Every Step
A common misconception of RCM is that specific steps are more critical than others. However, this is a fallacy. Each step is as important as any other, as a mistake or lack of performance in a single step impacts the rest of the cycle.
Capturing the patient’s information upfront is critical to begin the billing process. Registration will ensure that you have the correct information for the patient and their insurance. In addition, capturing the charges for what services you provide the patient will impact the bill—if you record any inaccurately, you may miss a charge or overcharge.
Defining coverage and capturing a claim can’t be done without proper registration and information capturing. Likewise, medical coding can’t be done without the charges being captured. And finally, billing and payments may not be collected if you don’t have the proper registration information, codes, and charges.
Optimizing every step will improve your cash flow, and it will also improve customer satisfaction!
Leaving Money at the Table
When your RCM isn’t defined, optimized, and updated with changes, inevitably, your practice is losing money that you could be collecting.
Every step in the cycle is critical to optimize. A single mistake can cascade to every other step and cause a loss of profit.
The collections process of your RCM is critical. It not only needs to be accurate but also timely. If you wait too long to start the collections process, you will lose money. An optimized RCM will help automate this process so you will not have to spend a lot of time tracking down people to collect the money for your services.
How Can I Prevent These Mistakes?
At Orchard Medical Management, we can help optimize your RCM. We offer various services to optimize an already established RCM, help you develop a process for a new RCM, or help with specific steps of your RCM that you’d like to focus on.
Running a practice can be enough work on its own, which is why we are a great partner to many practices. So instead of worrying about the latest coding regulations or most modern ways to increase efficiency, you can let us help in that area while you get back to what matters most to you.