Minimize Accounts Receivable
Top 4 Ways to Minimize Accounts Receivable (AR) Days
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Top 4 Ways to Minimize Accounts Receivable (AR) Days
irstly, the patient receives a shockingly expensive bill that reduces trust in the medical practice or a hospital. Furthermore, the Accounts Receivables (AR) reports are inaccurate disrupting the overall financial process
IAn efficient revenue cycle is significant in maintaining the financial health of a healthcare organization. Healthcare revenue cycle ensures smooth operational functions by taking care of physician compensation, overheads, research, new technology investments and more. Revenue cycle process gaps can have a significant and direct impact on increasing Accounts Receivable (AR) days. Revenue cycle involves multiple processes including eligibility verification, claims, denial management, among the others. Any inefficacies in the process would impact the entire revenue cycle management—causing unnecessary collection and cash flow delays.
Accounts Receivables must be managed efficiently to ensure the smooth functioning of the revenue cycle process. Streamlining the entire process requires a cohesive approach from all the stakeholders including—the doctors, care coordinators, etc. Let’s delve deeper into four key strategies to minimize AR days.
A front-end driven approach to healthcare revenue cycle improves clinician and patient experiences by eliminating the administrative tasks from patient care. This also improves collections. When a patient is scheduled for a visit, the office staff begins with the eligibility verification, pre-authorization and other processes. Instead of working on this process on the backend, doing it upfront facilitates pre-pay, drives down collection costs—significantly reducing bad debts.
Accelerate your healthcare revenue cycle process by leveraging the capabilities of your Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). Evaluate your existing data status in terms of patient experience, Patient Satisfaction Index (PSI) and look for future trends. You can even use benchmarking tools to compare your data against your fellow healthcare facilities to analyze data and identify gaps and scope for improvements. Enterprise Data Warehouse analysis gives you 360-degree insights in clinical, financial and patient satisfaction measures—helping you examine the root causes of issues and fix them.
Claim denial management can make or break your revenue cycle process. While preventing claim denials can improve cash flow, claim rejections indicate lost revenues. Preventing claim rejections can greatly improve revenue collection. About 12 to 18 percent of claims are rejected—resulting in missed revenue opportunities altogether. Using automation and AI-powered insights to analyze claim denials can help you identify the root cause and fix the issue if any.
When you observe that your collections are continuously affected along with increased AR days, it’s time that you analyze and discuss the issue with your frontline staff. Your frontline staff are the people directly involved in the process and will best be able to share their insights on the issue and suggest possible solutions to resolve them.
Analyze workflows regularly and discuss your workflow efficiency strategies with your frontline staff. For instance, when the process involves workarounds, you need to identify the next steps towards eliminating possible future workarounds.
With changing regulations, and evolving healthcare financial landscape, healthcare organizations must focus on billing and AR collections to maximize efficiencies of a healthcare business. Healthcare facilities cannot overlook the revenue cycle issues. Hospitals need to leverage Artificial intelligence and analytics to determine the gaps in the revenue cycle infrastructure and implement the necessary changes—while maintaining the cash flow.
Whichever route you take, remember that you need to have a strategic approach, allocate the right resources—to achieve maximum efficiency in your revenue cycle performance. You can realize a significant difference when you integrate best practices and proven strategies into your healthcare revenue cycle process.
To learn more on optimizing revenue cycle performance in your healthcare organization, talk to our team
From our humble beginnings as a healthcare start-up—to becoming a full-blown healthcare-exclusive digital transformation provider, our journey has been quite a remarkable one. Today, SolvEdge is a leading-edge Healthcare services and solutions provider—trusted by 450+ Hospitals, 3500+ Physicians and millions of patients across the globe.