The decision to outsource key functions of your healthcare company is a big one. Revenue cycle management significantly impacts your bottom line, so you shouldn’t trust this task to just about anyone. But if you find a trusted, experienced company, the benefits of outsourcing are endless.
The Benefits of Outsourcing Revenue Cycle Management
While you may lose control of the revenue cycle management process when you outsource, the pros significantly outweigh the cons. Here’s why your practice should consider outsourcing.
1. Significant Cost and Time Savings
When you outsource your revenue management, you save big on costs. The cost to manage staff in-house is one of your most significant expenses when running a practice. It’s often more expensive to do your billing and coding in-house, especially if you don’t have up-to-date software.
However, medical billing services have certified coders, medical billing and coding software, and tools that manage patient receivables. Plus, they’ll know how to maximize your revenue.
2. Spend More Time With Patients
You won’t be able to spend as much time with your patients if you’re busy fiddling with your revenue cycle management. When you hand this task over to the experts, you and your staff can pay more attention to patient care, reduce billing errors, and spend less time on administration.
3. Experienced Coding and Billing Staff
When turnover rates are high, and the talent pool is low, employers often outsource to find quality hires. On the other hand, smaller practices may not be able to hire the coding and billing talent they need to keep their business afloat. Either way, outsourcing companies are there to help out.
Experienced billing and coding staff will be able to keep up with regulation changes that could result in costly errors. Plus, meaningful use/MIPS/MACRA is typically handled for you when you outsource. To reduce HIPAA violations and denials, outsource your revenue cycle management.
4. Improved Consistency and Transparency
Your outsourcing company of choice should deliver comprehensive performance reports on an easy-to-use dashboard. If they don’t, look elsewhere. You’ll need these reports to keep track of your billing performance and operations without having to micromanage or constantly call.
5. No Need to Retrain or Retain Staff
Unless your staff is trained to keep up with billing and coding changes, you’ll have to schedule training seminars at least once a week, but preferably every day. These seminars could include a simple information look-up or involve hours of coding, billing, or regulatory instruction.
Not only is this kind of training challenging to scale, but it’s expensive. You also have to be aware of these changes and ensure your team is following protocol. When you hire an outsourcing company, they’ll ensure your team is well-trained, retained, and up-to-date on any changes.
6. Increased Accuracy and Efficiency
It’s common to fall behind on admin tasks, especially when our focus is split. However, past-due payments and denials could significantly impact your cash flow, so you’ll need to stay on top of your billing to reduce errors. An outsourcing company will keep everything accurate and efficient.
7. Produce a Higher Clean Claims Rate
Clean claims are zero mistake, accurate, certified “perfect” claims. We love clean claims that don’t require any corrections or extra information because there’s virtually no chance that they’ll be denied. To boost the revenue in your practice, you need to improve your clean claims rate.
While an outsourcing company can’t guarantee a 100% clean claims rate, they can significantly increase it. That’s because these experts are hired to improve your practice’s revenue.
