Managing growth may become one of your more interesting challenges as your medical practice becomes ever more successful. As you take on more patients and offer a wider array of RCM services or additional specialists, for example, your revenue expands as well.
Keeping the cash flowing can become more difficult as your deal with new personnel and logistical issues that come with growth.
Under such circumstances, you can imagine what a relief it would be if someone else could take on the responsibilities of handling the increased amount and rate of money that’s coming in now. To continue along these lines, here are four reasons why you should consider outsourced Revenue Cycle Management or RCM.
1. Your Organization Is Growing at an Unprecedented Rate
You’ve brought in some outstanding physicians and support staff and as a result, the local community has responded with more patients than ever before coming through your doors. If you hadn’t anticipated that you would grow this quickly, it’s normal that staff could fall behind in such a key area as revenue cycle management.
Rather than trying to predict just how many more staff you might need and then determining how much training they will need to get up to the level of your current team, you can avoid a lot of headaches by switching over to outsourced RCM.
2. The Accountant Says Reduce Operating Costs Or Cut Staff
When your accountant brings you the bad news about needing to reduce expenses in the form of operations or in personnel, you have a huge motivation to take RCM tasks away from your team and hand them off to professionals. The bad news can turn to good when you realize that you will improve the RCM with the help of outside experts.
3. Too Many Staff Errors Are Interfering with Revenue Flow
After a recent audit of your processes, you determine that employees are making more mistakes that lead to delays in processing claims and getting a timely payment. This can be a sign that your team bit off more than it could chew.
Mounting errors may be just the tip of the iceberg. Rather than going through a rough period of intensive retraining that may not net you the results you need as quickly as you’d prefer, consider outsourcing revenue cycle management and getting your financials back into better shape.
4. Lack of Time to Train Your Team Consistently as Regulations Change
Consider how government mandates will change how you do things on a daily basis at your practice, such as the recent switch over from ICD-9 to version 10 of the International Classification of Diseases code base.
Time may be too precious for you to allocate any more to internal training. With RCM outsourcing, you can rest assured that the professionals you put your trust in will be focused on staying current on all healthcare-related regulations and other financial implications that will affect how you get reimbursed for services.
Paying close attention to the health of your medical practice may lead you sooner than you imagined to the day where you outsource your RCM. Instead of deploying more assets, such as hiring new people and training them to become experts at your practice’s medical billing methods, it makes sense to have third-party revenue cycle management experts devote their time and energy to keeping the cash flowing for you. This lets you focus more resources on practicing medicine and patient care.
Key Takeaway
- Revenue Cycle Management can become more problematic when the number of patients your staff is seeing grows faster than the team who handles your billing.
- In many cases, a medical organization finds that unprecedented success can bring added problems, including delays in the billing cycle.
- If your accountant warns you about operating costs, one way to reduce them is by outsourcing the RCM you used to handle in-house.
- When staff members start making more errors, it might be time to outsource rather than throwing more money to provide additional training.
- Keeping up with changing government regulations and industry best practices can be so difficult and time-consuming that it begins to make sense to outsource RCM tasks, going forward.
