With the reimbursement landscape constantly evolving, the uncertainty surrounding claim approvals and payments has increased exponentially. To swim against the tide and come out at the other end profitable is a challenge for orthotics and prosthetics practices.
To grow and scale quickly, an increasing number of O&P practices are partnering with revenue cycle management companies. Associating with a RCM partner offers cost control and scalability.
But beyond these benefits can your revenue cycle partner be a catalyst of growth?
Outsourcing revenue cycle functions is a leap of faith. These five questions should be asked of your RCM vendor to meet long-term financial goals.
A tech-enabled revenue cycle improves performance, quickens workflows, and promotes ongoing improvement. A revenue cycle vendor who offers a robust technology infrastructure offers a huge cost advantage. The investment required to build a tech-powered revenue cycle is reduced drastically. Also, the mandate for electronic health records and interoperability makes it crucial that the revenue cycle management system is capable of handling vast amounts of patient and payer data securely. Is your data safe? What are the informational and physical security protocols in place to manage data? The answers to these questions are critical to the financial and operational health of orthotics and prosthetics practices.
Transparency forms the bedrock of successful outsourcing partnerships. How do you measure the productivity of teams who don’t sit across the room from you? The short answer: Department specific productivity reports.
Productivity scorecards and performance reports break down the walls between vendors and O&P practices. It offers clear-eyed insights into the performance of the revenue cycle partner and the efforts taken to propel growth. Performance analytics helps in understanding the productivity and quality of work delivered. To truly understand the value of your partnership ask for a process that measures and monitors workforce performance consistently.
Data is just the starting point. To glean insights from data and drive change is the key to consistent growth. How does your revenue cycle management company put the power of data into action? Is the information being used to reduce denial rates, monitor contractual inconsistencies, improve coding compliance and accelerate cycle times?
With the amount of valuable data that the revenue cycle contains it is important to have proven processes to not just tap into insights but translate them into better financial outcomes.
Most revenue cycle vendors collect a percentage of net collections. This pricing model is effective as it can handle volume fluctuations and is fairly straightforward. But can it cost you more than you think? The answer is, yes. Net collections also includes the payments collected upfront from patients. This means losing thousands of dollars of money that rightfully belongs to you. A more viable pricing solution is to collect a percentage of collections that is collected from insurers by the RCM vendor and excludes upfront patient payments.
Also, a tiered pricing structure provides a lot more flexibility. Offering multiple pricing structures and business engagement models allows for a greater degree of control over costs.
Does your revenue cycle partner care about the patient experience as much as you do? Patients find it difficult to navigate through the reimbursement landscape.
Can your RCM vendor make the payment experience better for them? Do they have software to improve patient access functions? How do they collect patient payments?
These questions are central to providing your patients a frictionless payment experience. Work with a revenue cycle partner who puts the patient front and center and cares about your patients as much as you do!