The entire physician revenue cycle, from scheduling patients to collecting final reimbursement, involves many steps, several of them requiring tedious paperwork.
This convoluted workflow can allow underpayments, denials and ignored claims to fall through the cracks. With the MGMA estimating that U.S. medical practices are, on average, failing to collect 25% of the money they’re owed for treating patients, you can’t afford to let your workflow work against you.
Power Your Practice understands the financial challenges medical practices are facing and is here to help. Every week during our A/R Best Practices series, we’re describing the must-have features managers need to look for in practice management systems to manage and collect all of their receivables.
Simplify Administrative Task Management
The manual work of practice administration not only makes practices less efficient, but the more steps that must be taken during the process, the greater the likelihood of costly and time-wasting mistakes occurring. Every mistake or missed assignment creates a bump in the road that impedes the process further down the line.
That’s why the most efficient medical practices use software to automate their workflow. For example, after a scheduled patient visit, the system can automatically begin all the steps required for submitting a claim.
Top-notch systems can respond in defined ways to all kinds of different events, such as patient scheduling, expired due dates and upcoming deadlines. That makes sure all the right information is delivered to the right people, and tasks are properly assigned and monitored by management.
Customized responses can range from automatically generating forms to emailing employees a new assigned task or notifying management when jobs haven’t been completed.
That helps practices by:
1. Improving efficiency – When practice workflow is automated, a lot of time-consuming manual tasks are eliminated, and fewer mistakes are made that can lead to the practice failing to collect all the money it’s owed.
2. Increasing visibility and control – The system can also provide an organized view of every single charge, denial, underpayment, and lost or ignored charge and claim.
3. Better staff management – Using a system’s workflow engine to manage the practice’s revenue gives the company an easy way to make sure practice staff is completing all work in a timely manner.
How do you manage your practice’s administrative workflow?
Next week, we’ll discuss how using a system that compiles reporting and analytics can improve your efficiency.
