Your practice may offer the best services and the best patient experience around, but you could still be losing money. Why? Because you’ve yet to master the 7 steps of revenue cycle management (RCM).
Becoming an expert at RCM may take more time than you’re willing to spend, though. That’s where revenue cycle experts like Epic River come in.
Outsourcing some or all your RCM tasks can save you time and improve your profits. But the first step to choosing the right outsourcing partner is to identify the weak spots in your revenue cycle, which is why we’ve compiled this list of the 7 steps of RCM.
Curious about where your practice is going wrong with your revenue cycle? Keep reading and find out how Epic River’s patient financing program can help.
1. Patient Pre-authorization
The first step in your revenue cycle is pre-authorizing patients. This means identifying if the patient’s upcoming medication, procedure, or other service is deemed medically necessary.
2. Verifying Eligibility and Benefits
For each patient that enters your practice, you have to verify insurance eligibility and benefits. While many practices leave this step until the end of their revenue cycle, experts suggest verifying eligibility before the service is rendered increases the likelihood of a patient paying their bill.
3. Charge Capture
Before you can submit a claim and see reimbursement, you need to have accurate documentation of services rendered. This step is vital to making sure you get paid in full for the services you provide.
4. Submitting Claims
Without coding and filing a claim, your practice won’t get paid for services rendered. More practices than ever are turning to automation to help reduce human error common in this step of your RCM.
5. Payment Posting
Patient responsibility is finally posted once their claim has been submitted and reviewed. At this time, the patient can access his or her data and submit payments.
6. Managing Denials
90% of claims denials are preventable and when you include denial management in your RCM, you can identify where you went wrong when filing the claim and how to prevent the problem in the future. That way, you won’t have to go through lengthy appeals.
7. AR Follow-up
If you aren’t collecting patient responsibilities in a timely manner, you’re exposing yourself to AR-related costs. What’s more, most practices agree that if you haven’t collected a patient debt after 90 days, you won’t receive it at all.
Patient Financing Reduces Days in AR
The majority of medical practices either are or plan to outsource their AR follow-up. If you’re one of them, you need to know about Epic River’s patient financing.
Our patient lending program has a proven track record of helping hospitals and practices reduce AR days. We connect your patients with our partner financial institutions so you can offload the loan process to the experts. That way, you can focus on caring for your patients.
Have you been searching for a way to improve your RCM by reducing AR days? Then get in touch with Epic River to find out how we can help your practice save more time and make more profits.
Leave a Comment