Top 3 Biggest Revenue Cycle Challenges for Healthcare Organizations

 

The healthcare management space remains fluid and dynamic as new industry trends continue to surface in the wake of the global pandemic. It’s no surprise that demand for healthcare revenue cycle management expertise is potent as ever, given the tremendous financial pressures at play for today’s hospitals and providers. From a business standpoint, maintaining a healthy bottom line requires that we meet these challenges head-on – or risk critical financial ramifications.

 

The bulk of current healthcare difficulties link back to three overarching categories: people, processes, and technology. These are the areas that providers must aggressively target in the near term, knowing that many of our existing pain points show no signs of slowing. Revenue cycle management companies can greatly assist in these categories.

 

With regards to people, staffing shortages are an unfortunate commonality across a wealth of industries, including healthcare. Hospitals are among the many businesses battling heavy turnover rates, impacting internal resources across the revenue cycle. According to a September US Bureau of Labor Statistics Report, healthcare has lost over a half million workers since February 2020. In some cases, vaccine mandates have exacerbated staffing inadequacies even further. Effective recruiting and retention strategies are of critical importance in today’s market, especially for hospitals struggling with widespread employee burnout.

 

In the same vein, health systems can position themselves for success by mobilizing well-trained talent. Ongoing skills training to ensure core competencies is essential towards achieving improved patient satisfaction, superior operational performance, medical billing and medical coding accuracy, and compliance with evolving local, state, and federal regulations. A hospital is only as strong as its people, and your organization’s revenue cycle performance improvement hinges on the development of robust training and education programs.

 

This brings us to processes. Designing effective workflows throughout the revenue cycle is vital, but healthcare organizations oftentimes have difficulty identifying their own internal workflow gaps, causing inefficiencies in productivity. Objective assessments conducted by third parties typically reveal valuable insights, igniting process improvement initiatives and training opportunities for staff. Streamlined workflows implementing revenue cycle services can then accelerate the revenue cycle, enhance cash flow, boost employee morale, and drive patient satisfaction.

 

Finally, technology is easily one of the most resonant factors impacting today’s health systems, with many hospitals and health systems using legacy platforms lacking advanced capabilities. While investing in new technology predictably requires significant financial spend, the long-term outcomes are well worth the initial expense. To maximize productivity and output, facilities need to abandon and replace outdated solutions or disparate tools that cannot interact harmoniously and implement revenue cycle services that do.

 

Hospitals are understandably concerned with attracting patients and delivering exceptional care, and the healthcare market is rife with cutting edge software and systems that far exceed yesterday’s resources. As far as billing infrastructure, the latest health information technology can help your organization effortlessly keep track of claims through their entire lifecycle, ensuring that payments are collected in a timely manner and denied claims are properly addressed. From a patient perspective, effective technology can vastly simplify the complexities and burdens of a medical visit, from intake procedures and scheduling all the way through billing and final payment.

 

In short, today’s healthcare systems stand to benefit from emphasizing employee retention and education, ongoing process improvement strategies, and the use of modern technology. A knowledgeable revenue cycle management partner like Savista can provide objective feedback to help augment these pursuits and identify opportunities for progress.

 

Strategic Partnerships

 

Click here for more from Savista CCO, who spoke with Modern Healthcare about the benefits of partnering with an outside revenue cycle management company.