5 Proven Ways to Get More Patients

Emergence Healthcare Group is here to help doctors run successful and profitable medical practices. An effective and efficient revenue cycle management (RCM) system is essential to make that happen. 

The revenue cycle process, however, is notoriously difficult, inefficient, and prone to errors. A sound RCM system can be incredibly beneficial to your organization, allowing you to forecast revenue accurately, pinpoint friction points in the billing process, and identify waste and fraud more readily.

The lack of an efficient revenue cycle within healthcare organizations can have the opposite effect, leading to more medical billing errors, lost revenue, an unhealthy working environment, and unhappy patients. 

To help healthcare practices operate as effectively and efficiently as possible, we explore the consequences healthcare organizations can encounter due to improper revenue cycle management.

1. Lost Revenue

Private practice doctors know that the key to running a profitable medical practice starts with effective revenue cycle management. When inefficiencies in the cycle are present, a practice can lose thousands — if not millions of dollars per year. 

Research by McKinsey shows that 15% of every U.S. healthcare dollar spent goes toward revenue cycle inefficiencies. 

The main things that negatively impact the revenue cycle:

• Incorrect patient scheduling
• Inaccurate patient registration
• Errors in billing and coding
• Failure to verify insurance eligibility

A flawed billing process is the most prominent problem practices face, leading to high percentages of applicable income lost. Incorrect coding and costly reworks of claims are everyday struggles for most practices.

One of the main areas a good RCM strategy should focus on is clean claims. Your clean claims ratio is essential for a profitable practice. A clean claim is one that’s paid the first time, which means the claim:

• Was never rejected
• Did not have a preventable denial
• Was not filed more than once
• Had no errors

2. Organizational Stress

When you have a poor RCM process in place and a disconnect between departments, stress levels can quickly rise, and staff morale can plummet.  With the RCM process requiring both front-end and back-end operations, proper staff training and open communication channels become essential. 

If your reception staff isn’t well trained in collecting, processing, and tracking patient data, incorrect processing can occur with errors, costing a practice tens of thousands of dollars a year. Similar breakdowns in the process can happen when your physicians and staff don’t communicate properly, leading to rejected claims, unaccounted payments, and slow turnaround.

3. Poor Patient Experiences

As healthcare costs continue to rise, patient expectations are also increasing. With healthcare consumers growing increasingly frustrated with slow manual processes, practices must start to provide quality digital experiences in addition to exceptional clinical care. Modernizing revenue cycle management with technology is key to improving the patient experience and profitability.

According to research by Survata, 41% of patients would leave their providers if they did not have a good patient financial experience or access to certain digital tools.

Since patients are willing to switch providers based on their experiences, practices must embrace digital technology to allow patients to pay medical bills online, access clinical and financial information through patient portals, and receive communications via email or text.

4. Reduced Levels of Care

The primary focus of everything we do at Emergence is improving the time doctors and patients can spend together. A weak RCM process threatens that precious time, forcing a private practice doctor to handle tedious back office chores. 

Wherever possible, the focus should be on automating and outsourcing any regular administrative tasks to improve patient care and experience.

How to Optimize Revenue Cycle Management

High-quality patient care begins with effective RCM. Luckily there are some things you can focus on optimizing within your practice to improve your revenue cycle management. These include:

• Implementing new technology 
• Digitizing manual processes and tasks - like medical billing
• Overhauling workflows
• Investing in staff education
• Hiring additional staff

The Benefits of Outsourcing

The COVID-accelerated shift to more telehealth and digital care solutions is the perfect time to invest in optimizing your RCM.

The professionals at Emergence are experts in revenue cycle management. We optimize revenue and reinvest it into products and services that remove daily clerical and business demands, protecting your time with patients. Our administrative and medical billing services can help you focus on what matters: patient care.

According to The Market Reports, the global healthcare revenue cycle management outsourcing market will grow from $11.7 billion in 2017 to $23 billion by 2023.

The same research found that healthcare practices that have outsourced their revenue cycle management have experienced significant improvement in their collection rates, denial resolution efficiency, patient satisfaction rates, and revenue.

The benefits of using Emergence:

You get paid because we get it right the first time.

Our highly-trained healthcare Medical Assistants, workflow, and quality controls help to get claims paid the first time, not the sixth. We provide the technology and tools for staff to collect co-pays at the point of service, including working with insurance companies to confirm eligibility and coverage at the time of their visit, not after they’ve left the building.

Money where it’s needed

Emergence optimizes revenue and reinvests it into products and services that remove daily clerical and business demands, protecting your time with patients.

Insights at your fingertips

Monthly financial reports, patient data, and practice performance metrics are readily available to give you a complete picture of your practice and identify what’s working well and what could be improved.

When you grow, we do too.

Emergence has every incentive to help you succeed because we only get paid – and grow – when you do.

Talk to our team today and rethink your revenue.