Start the Year Off Right: Strategies for Enhancing Revenue Cycle Performance
Discover essential strategies to optimize your revenue cycle for maximum efficiency and success in 2024.
Streamlining operations in the year ahead
The start of a new year is the ideal time to fine-tune your revenue cycle, paving the way for maximum efficiency in 2024. Neglecting to optimize your operations and systems won’t just impact your bottom line but will also result in frustrated teams and dissatisfied patients.
To ensure a successful year ahead, a comprehensive approach is required that demands a thorough examination of your existing management practices, performance metrics, and strategic methodologies. A deep dive into these areas can provide valuable insights into the gaps where best practices are needed and identify opportunities where technology can maximize your profitability.
Start with these questions to unlock the full potential of your revenue cycle in 2024:
Is our workflow streamlined?
The delivery of patient care in 2024 demands the completion of repetitive tasks and the processing an ever-growing amount of data. According to the National Library of Medicine, “inefficient workflows are a pervasive problem that affect everyone in healthcare, including clinicians facing burnout due to managing care delivery tasks, and patients and caregivers facing complex care management tasks.”
Mapping your revenue cycle workflow offers a starting point for assessing if your current processes still function optimally and align with your health system’s goals. Additionally, comparing anticipated output to actual output at each step can help pinpoint existing bottlenecks and potential blockages. However, the most valuable insights stem from a collaborative approach and gathering employee feedback. Their frontline experiences offer a unique perspective and should be used to guide workflow adjustments and enhancements.
Which best practices are being implemented?
A comprehensive review of your revenue cycle should involve stepping back and assessing the implementation of best practices from the beginning of the patient journey to the receipt of payments. Assess whether your health system is implementing the following recommended revenue cycle management best practices:
- Patient-Centered Approach: Prioritize patient engagement in your revenue cycle processes
- Collect at Time of Service: Gather as many patient details at the point of service as possible, including personal information, insurance, co-payments, deductibles, and any outstanding balance
- Streamlined Integration: Consolidate revenue cycle management to a single provider that can integrate with your EMR or existing system
- Comprehensive Claim Tracking: Enable a transparent audit trail by centralizing patient data and communications in an accessible system, ensuring comprehensive tracking of claims from start to finish
- Frontline Feedback: Create ongoing opportunities for frontline staff to share feedback, ensuring their input is carefully reviewed and processes are adjusted when needed
- Denials Monitoring: Develop an effective system to monitor and track denials, identifying patterns and root causes
- Routine KPI Checks: Review regularly your set key performance indicators (KPIs) to identify problems and find opportunities for improvement
Is there ongoing staff development and training available?
Professionals in revenue cycle management oversee insurance processing, scheduling, registration, eligibility, claims management, billing, collections, denials, and more. Whether employees are new or experienced, providing them with education and training to support their career growth and advancement is essential to fostering a positive company culture and increasing employee retention.
What key performance metrics are being tracked?
Monitoring metrics closely tied to revenue performance in both the front and back end of the revenue cycle can provide insights into the overall financial health of your organization. According to Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), providers should regularly track the following KPIs:
- Point of service (POS) and cash collections
- Charge capture
- Accounts receivable (A/R)
- Clean claims rate
- Net adjusted collections
- Initial denials
- Bad debt
By tracking and evaluating these KPIs, you can pinpoint areas for enhancement and empower data-driven decision-making.
Are front-end processes operating at peak efficiency?
According to Becker’s Hospital Review, “a full 50% of denials are connected to front-end tasks and 86% of those are potentially avoidable.” The good news? Front-end revenue cycle tasks present significant opportunities for automation, resulting in fewer denials and greater precision. In fact, KLAS reports that “revenue cycle leaders believe automation will lead to an evolved revenue cycle workforce where staff are repurposed and workflows are more efficient and consolidated, enabling staff to tackle more challenging assignments.”
Although implementing automation can seem daunting, taking proactive steps to embrace this technology is essential for maintaining a competitive edge and avoiding the need for hasty catch-up endeavors later on. Effective automation implementation relies on taking small steps rather than overwhelming yourself with tasks beyond your capacity. Striving for measured progress helps build a strong foundation without stretching your capabilities too thin, and one way to achieve this is by using automation to complete repetitive, mundane tasks for your patient access team. This shift alleviates the weight of administrative duties, allowing them to redirect their focus toward other essential responsibilities.
How Vyne Medical Can Help
Vyne Medical is dedicated to helping hospitals, health systems, clinicians, and payers achieve sustainable performance by streamlining the exchange of healthcare communication data. By Connecting Disconnected Data®, our solutions close the gaps between disparate systems. The result is improvement of healthcare data exchange and the continuum of care through a more complete and fully accessible patient record, strengthening financial outcomes, operational performance, and the patient experience.
As automation takes on a greater role in revenue cycle optimization, the challenge lies in finding a vendor, such as Vyne Medical, capable of integrating with your EMR and automatically capturing, transcribing, and indexing disparate data directly into the patient record. When automation completes the revenue cycle’s tedious, manual tasks, you save time and:
- Reduce errors
- Streamline workflow processes
- Boost revenue
With flexible options, our practical automation solutions have diverse capabilities that can transform your front-end processes. Empowering your teams with more time and greater precision, Vyne Medical® solutions help:
- Identify document type
- Extract data
- Index to the patient record
- Reduce spam and incomplete data
- Route and split
- Establish touchless operations and more
Schedule your complimentary workflow assessment today for re-engineered workflow diagrams, impact analysis, estimated ROI*, project scope, and a clear timeline for implementation. Start optimizing your 2024 revenue cycle operations today!
Explore Further
Want to dive deeper? Read more on the topics covered in this blog:
- Webinar: Maximize Your Revenue Cycle Performance
- Transforming Healthcare Operations Through Automation
- How a Growth Mindset Can Drive Automation Success in Healthcare
*ROI analysis is for exploratory purposes only and in no way guarantees results and is simply an estimator of outcomes based on variable input entered
Sources:
“3 Pivotal Processes to Revamp Your Front-End Revenue Cycle.” Go.beckershospitalreview.com, go.beckershospitalreview.com/finance/3-pivotal-processes-to-revamp-your-front-end-revenue-cycle.
HFMA. “7 Kpis Providers Should Be Tracking.” HFMA, 6 Apr. 2023, www.hfma.org/revenue-cycle/kpis/7-kpis-providers-should-be-tracking/.
“Revenue Cycle Management Summit 2023 | KLAS Report.” Klasresearch.com, klasresearch.com/report/revenue-cycle-management-summit-2023-moving-toward-meaningful-automation-and-defining-autonomous-coding/3383.
Zayas-Cabán, Teresa, et al. “Priorities to Accelerate Workflow Automation in Health Care.” Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, vol. 30, no. 1, 19 Oct. 2022, https://doi.org/10.1093/jamia/ocac197