Improve Profitability and Reduce Cost-To-Collect

Healthcare organizations have many functional areas to work upon, but the
two main areas that affect the hospital’s sustenance are billing and
collections. Billing influences a hospital’s revenue for the future and
collections impact the financial health of the organization.

There are some aspects of healthcare financial management if reworked and technologically updated, it can multiply the prospects of success in billing
and collections.

An article on Becker’s Hospital Review discusses how a six-hospital health system that serves more than 2 million patients per year uses a customizable
online financial engagement platform to evaluate billing process issues
and find solutions for the same.

This financial engagement platform is one of the hundreds of products
 available that help hospitals prevent billing and/or collection bottlenecks.

Billing and collection bottlenecks:

Information Technology

Operational budgeting or forecasting

Streamlining patient access functions

Improving physician productivity

Implementing a collections module

Outdated fee schedule

Coding audits

Achieving economies of scale by externalizing RCM functions

Billing vendors not meeting the SLAs

Losing the common thread with RCM vendors

1. Information Technology (IT)

Information technology has been enabling healthcare organizations to
restructure staffing models, speed up billing process, increase collections
and also communicate with patients quickly and efficiently.
IT has been indirectly responsible for securing steady and good inflow of
revenues. Using a good billing software or a collections module or
an EHR that has some part of the billing process integrated into
 it can increase the efficiency of billing cycles. Read More