One of the trends I see happening today is many organizations focusing too narrowly on things like meaningful use that they don’t take time to handle many of the important financial aspects of a practice. Many people call this revenue cycle management, but I loved how this whitepaper called it Revenue Cycle Mastery.
The reality is that there’s so much more to revenue cycle than most people realize. Most people think revenue cycle is just about focusing on collecting payments quicker and getting more patients to pay their bills. While those are both important aspects of your revenue cycle, there’s much more to revenue cycle mastery. The above whitepaper breaks up revenue cycle mastery into these areas:
Chapter 1 Financial Clearance
Chapter 2 Check-in and Check-out
Chapter 3 Charge Capture
Chapter 4 Coding
Chapter 5 Charge Entry
Chapter 6 Claims Management
Chapter 7 Patient Statements
Chapter 8 Payment and Denial Posting
Chapter 9 Insurance Follow-up
Chapter 10 Denial Management
Chapter 11 Patient Collections
Chapter 12 Payor Management
I’m sure that every healthcare organization can look through this list and see ways that they can improve their organizations approach to revenue. If you’re not sure what each section means, download the full whitepaper where they go into detail on each.
While I’m excited about the benefits of IT on improving healthcare, I also think there’s a tremendous opportunity to use IT to improve revenue. Every chapter listed above could benefit from a well implemented IT system. IT might not always be the right answer, but it can usually help you accomplish some part of the equation faster.
Which of the topics listed above do you think is most important for a healthcare organization to solve first?
A very informational white paper and I agree with you John, IT can certainly improve revenue once an end user broadens their perspective. I would suggest they first determine the demographics of their patients that comprise the revenue cycle?
After the appropriate revenue and gap analysis is done many of the chapter points are simultaneously important so it’s a challenging question to answer.