Managing a busy revenue cycle team while keeping morale and productivity high can be a real challenge—especially when the holidays are long gone and spring is taking too long to arrive.
Fortunately, there are ways to make life easier for your team and yourself:
1. Stop Claim Scrubbing, Start Charge Scrubbing
“Charge Correct and Repost” is an inefficient, time-consuming process that delays payments and distorts your reporting. Why delay quality assurance until after claims are created?
Instead, streamline your team’s workflow by replacing your claim reviews with pre-claim reviews. Reviewing—and correcting—charges before your team creates a claim eliminates the extra work and time required to delete, fix, and repost after the fact.
Bottom line: charge scrubbing delivers more efficient results than claim scrubbing. Empowering your team to do things right the first time always feels better—and is much more productive—than going back and fixing mistakes later.
2. Take Advantage of the Latest Automation
Done right, achieving higher levels of automation in your revenue cycle can help you and your organization:
- Enhance employee morale, recruiting, and retention. The more you can automate dull, repetitive processes, the more time your team can spend on interesting, higher level work that engages their expertise and critical thinking—making it easier to attract and retain the best, most in-demand employees.
- Decrease human error. Unlike human beings, software doesn’t get tired, and its “mind” doesn’t wander or get bored while performing repetitive processes. It stays just as productive and focused late in the day on a Friday as it does on its best days. The result is higher accuracy and more consistent results.
- Get more work done in less time. Automating your processes can dramatically reduce cycle times, empowering your team to submit cleaner claims faster while reducing stress, overtime, and backlogs of work.
- Control operating costs. As your organization grows and the clinical and financial aspects of healthcare become more complex, automation can help your team process more claims more easily—and with less need for overtime or new hires.
- Identify and capture missed revenue opportunities. Automation can catch missing, incomplete, and inaccurate charges and other errors on claims before they go out.
3. Prepare your Revenue Cycle for Value-based Care
Many Revenue Cycle Directors and teams are concerned about the continuing growth of value-based reimbursement models—which have quickly spread to nearly all U.S. states—and the gradual shift away from traditional fee-for-service billing.
But instead of fearing the change, step back from the details and take a big-picture look at your current revenue cycle team’s training and expertise—and the highly refined processes and tools they use. With some smart modifications, you can apply the same logic—and a similar workflow—to meet the requirements of value-based contracts.
Under value-based care, claims still shouldn’t go straight from the doctors to the payers. Specialists with a coding mindset should still make sure claims are complete and include all the right codes required to keep your organization’s revenue flowing in. Sound familiar?
There’s even HCC coding automation software—similar to claim scrubbers—that automatically reviews all diagnosis codes coming out of your EMR, identifying HCC coding gaps so they can be corrected before they jeopardize value-based reimbursements.
The sooner you and your team start preparing for the value-based future while staying on top of your fee-for-service claims, the more confident and secure you’ll feel—and the more valuable you’ll be to your organization, now and in the months and years ahead.
Have questions? Need solutions? Feel free to reach out—we’re always happy to help.
