Top 5 Revenue Cycle Management Issues

Like Jennifer, I’m going to be heading to AHIMA 2012 as well. She correctly identifies that ICD-10 is a major AHIMA topic and Upcoding is the topic de jour, but another topic which I think continues to sit under the radar at AHIMA is revenue cycle management.

In many ways this makes sense when you consider that the ICD-10 has such an influence on revenue. Upcoding is all about revenue. Even healthcare documentation is dominated by a discussion of its impact on revenue (Yes, we could discuss why this should be about patient care in a future post). While many don’t want to admit it, humans need to get paid to survive and they want to get paid as much as they can get. Last that I checked doctors were human.

What then are the challenges that doctors face with revenue cycle management (or revenue integrity which many like to call it)? Here’s a great list of RCM challenges as listed by Ruth Zwieg on LinkedIn:

1. Managing the revenue cycle of a practice starts with good Practice Management (PM) software; one that has an easy to use scheduling tool for the front desk and that can determine insurance eligibility before the patient arrives so that the practice can collect the correct co-pay and/or out-of-pocket expenses up front before seen by the physician. This increases A/R and saves time instead of spending resources collecting after the fact which is time consuming and expensive.

2. The PM software must be easy to integrate with their existing or new EMR so that the physician group can show meaningful use and get that incentive money. Many practices still think they have to get new Practice Management software when they start looking at EMRs and many EMR companies try to sway them this way so they can get the sale for their PM software and their EMR.

3. ICD-10 – Need I say more – you have written about this in detail. Some Practice Management systems have a coding assistant built in but most do not. Coding correctly determines payment.

4. Staff training is very important from the beginning of the revenue cycle (scheduling, verifying insurance) to managing the patient once he/she checks in to when the physician sees them to check out and billing/collecting. Just like every other business, time has to be managed and time is money, especially a physician’s time. The more efficient the staff and their use and understanding of the software, the more patients the physician can see.

5. Many hospitals have and still are purchasing physician practices because the physician either does not know the business side of running a practice or just wants to be on salary and get rid of the headaches. Billing for physician practices is different than hospital billing. Hospitals are realizing that their hospital staff may not be doing the best job of that. In addition, the hospitals are realizing that their hospital system’s EHR does not have the desired functionality that a physician group needs or worse, they have multiple physician practices all using different EMRs that the hospital now has to manage or integrate into one.

I find this list really interesting and does speak to many of the revenue challenges healthcare faces. If we could solve these five challenges we’d have done a lot of good for doctors.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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