4 Ways to Recover Healthcare Revenue Losses and Stop the Leaks
Quality healthcare is vital for a hospital’s thrive, but it’s not the sole component. A robust revenue cycle enhances patient satisfaction, staff contentment, and the organization’s financial health.
Hospitals must foster a culture highlighting the significance of revenue cycle management across all departments. Revenue cycle managers should maximize financial results and recoup revenue, even facing challenges.
Engaging Patients
Creating or enhancing patient loyalty is crucial for regaining lost revenue. Dedicated patients will feel more at ease seeking treatment at your facility and are likely to recommend it to others.
While various methods exist to establish, uphold, and boost patient loyalty, the key lies in involving patients throughout their care journey. This process often commences before patients physically visit your facility, make initial contact, or send their first email.
In today’s digital era, your online presence typically serves as a patient’s initial interaction with your organization. Although some aspects of your online reputation are beyond your control, such as online feedback, your website can significantly influence a consumer’s decision.
A professional website with a clean layout, easy navigation, and valuable links and resources can create a positive first impression.
Moreover, your website can be the focal point for your complete digital front door strategy. Investing in technology like medical coding software can create a convenient and seamless patient experience.
Foster Supportive Work Environments
The healthcare revenue cycle teams had to shift from traditional office setups to remote work due to the pandemic. Many organizations were unprepared for this sudden change in terms of technology, infrastructure, and culture.
To enhance the remote work experience, organizations can offer continuous technical support to address any issues promptly. This fosters a sense of connection among team members and eliminates obstacles like connectivity issues.
Revenue cycle leaders can also boost engagement in remote workplaces by:
- Organizing daily virtual meetings for sharing achievements and updates.
- Using webcams during meetings to facilitate interaction and familiarity among team members.
- Celebrating birthdays, work milestones, and other important occasions.
- Implementing efficient onboarding procedures for new remote staff.
Strive for Transparent Pricing
Many health systems implemented the CMS-required regulations for price transparency at the beginning of 2021. While it marked a step towards achieving transparency in pricing, more requirements are forthcoming.
From 2022 onwards, CMS will mandate that providers furnish good-faith price estimates for all services scheduled over three days in advance, and share these estimates with the patient’s health plan or directly with the patient if uninsured.
Patient cost estimators, which utilize procedure cost details and the patient’s health insurance data to project out-of-pocket expenses, will be crucial in attaining pricing transparency. However, accurately estimating a patient’s expenses hinges on the health system’s knowledge of the correct billing structure and the reimbursement expected from the payer. The goal of price transparency is to standardize on-the-spot collections for patients.
Oversee Payer Policies
Payer policies may shift unexpectedly, posing challenges for organizations to keep abreast of the latest updates.
Furthermore, payers might not always inform health systems about these policy alterations, necessitating a proactive policy strategy that takes into account various sources for updates:
- CMS Listserv: Utilizing CMS emails can serve as a valuable resource for policy revisions and notifications from CMS.
- Payer-provider advocate meetings: Revenue cycle leaders should commence payer-provider advocate meetings with policy updates to capture recent modifications.
- High-priority areas: In cases of limited resources within a health system, emphasis should be placed on policy adjustments related to high-value, high-volume sectors (e.g., oncology drugs) rather than low-value, low-volume domains (e.g., labs).
Endnote
Efficiently managing healthcare revenue cycle demands ongoing efforts, particularly as the industry evolves and faces new challenges. Hospitals can recover lost revenue and prevent future leakage by engaging patients, fostering supportive work environments, striving for transparent pricing, and staying informed about payer policies.
