Healthcare revenue can be affected by a variety of reasons leading to denials. If you feel like your physicians' billing staff is not able to keep up with the standards, it signifies that you need to start improving your medical billing process.
Enhancing cash flow in your medical billing is not as difficult as it may seem. There are various ways in which one can increase the revenue for their medical practice. Conducting internal audits is one great way of ensuring enhanced revenue as they help detect the processes which need to be improved.
In this blog, we will get deep insights into the importance of cash flow and the ways it can be used to enhance medical practice.
What is Cash flow in Physician Billing?
The movement of money within a healthcare organization at a particular time is called cash flow. There are various sources like insurance reimbursements, patient payments, and other revenue streams that may affect your revenue cycle.
It also includes expenses of the organizations such as rent, salaries, medical supplies, utilities, and operational costs.
Importance Of a Healthy Cash Flow Within Organization
Cash flow is an essential element for any practice as it directly affects the bottom line of the business. If cash flow is not consistent in ones practice it hampers the practices ability to compensate staff, invest more in technology, and pay the bills.
Positive cash flow indicates that a healthcare organization is getting more money than it spends on resources. This money can be used for expansion, bonuses, and investing in new technology.
On the other hand, a negative cash flow indicates that the healthcare practice is spending more money than the income. This impacts a medical practitioners operations.
Healthcare organizations need to manage their cash flow effectively by:
- Monitoring expenses & income
- Maintaining a reserve spending capacity for unexpected costs
- Optimizing collection and billing processes
- Negotiating payment conditions with vendors
An optimized cash flow management will ensure the profitability and stability of the medical practice.
Ways to Maximize Your Healthcare Practice Cash Flow
Cash flow constraints can lead to huge financial losses for any medical practice. However, there are certain practices that will optimize your cash flow.
Let's learn more about the ways to maximize cash flow.
Timely Submission of Claims
When it comes to cash flow, it becomes obvious that faster and more frequent claim submissions enhance the revenue of any healthcare organization. Healthcare organizations may not be able to submit timely claims for a variety of reasons like lack of experienced staff, no streamlined process, improper documentation, and insufficient regulation knowledge.
Physicians are often advised to outsource their billing or use automation to tackle these kinds of problems.
Managing Accounts Receivable
Healthcare organizations can achieve revenue targets with a streamlined and straightforward collection process. Accounts receivable play a crucial role in optimizing revenue cycle management.
Pending payments from patients or payers are the accounts receivable which according to the AAFP should be completed within 30-40 days for healthy cash flow management.
Managing smooth accounts receivable is a must to ensure cash flow consistency. Devising a payment collection mechanism for patients is essential to improve revenue.
Automatic Eligibility Verification
Lack of eligibility or proper coverage information is one of the most common reasons for claim denials. Healthcare organizations must have management software that is directly integrated with the billing software.
This integration fosters automatic eligibility verification, ensuring patients are covered for the services provided by the healthcare provider beforehand. If a patient is not covered for treatment, they are informed about it and have the chance to opt out of it.
The patient also has the chance to pay out of pocket if they want to take the treatment. This way the provider can be transparent about the payment responsibilities associated with any services or treatments rendered.
Optimized Denial Management
Denials put a huge burden on the cash flow and are a leading cause of revenue loss. According to a report by MGMA, approximately 20% of claims get denied due to certain repeated reasons.
Healthcare providers must identify the denial trends and ensure that the claims are reimbursed in the first go. Any sort of coding or documentation error will lead to the rejection of a claim.
Healthcare organizations must be proficient in billing by determining the most common trends due to which denials may happen. This will make your staff more cautious about these repeated errors and they can fix them before submitting the claim. An automatic claim scrubber helps the organization detect errors before submitting it for approval.
Collect Payment Promptly
Collection of a patients payment, once the treatment is over, is a challenging task as it requires collecting payments through different sources. Healthcare providers must try to collect copay and balance from the patients.
Healthcare providers must try to collect the payments upfront before providing the treatment. Telling the patient about their payment responsibility in advance helps you streamline the revenue flow.
It also enhances transparency, increases trust, and largely reduces payment delays. Informing the patient about the procedures not covered by insurance should also be done beforehand. This helps you to collect the payments faster and more efficiently.
Provide Different Payment Options
Healthcare practices must offer different payment options that add to the comfort of the patients. You can create a seamless cash flow optimization process for your physician billing which will enhance the revenue cycle of your practice.
Along with this, you must set up a system to send regular notifications and follow-ups for payments to the patients. This improves the chances of your payment collections significantly.
Keep Tracking Old Claims
A lot of times healthcare professionals miss out on collecting payments from the patients or the payers. If a claim is rejected again and again, it is obvious that after some time the healthcare professional will forget about it.
This can cause huge stress to your cash flow. Healthcare professionals must keep track of old claims and make regular follow-ups. This will help you collect every single penny which is due.
Outsourcing Physicians Billing
Outsourcing your physician billing is one of the best cash flow management stories which can easily increase the cash flow of your practice. Medical billing companies can significantly reduce a lot of burden on your shoulders, so you can have more time to invest in patient care.
This will especially help your organization if your staff is feeling overwhelmed with all the documentation required for accurate billing. If you outsource your billing to any medical billing company, you will not have to worry about documentation, claim submission, and other tasks that are important for maintaining a healthy cash flow.
Bottomline
Smooth and efficient cash flow plays a major role in any healthcare organization. In times like today when healthcare providers have to go through a lot of hassle to maintain proper documentation, physician billing companies like Unify Healthcare are simplifying the process for them.
Unify Healthcare Services has a great list of satisfied healthcare providers who have taken the services. They have all seen the benefits of letting the professionals take over the billing process. They have experienced a decrease in the hassle and an increase in their revenue. It has a team of expert and trained medical billers and coders who take care of all the physician billing requirements, ensuring that your revenue keeps growing.
Unify Healthcare Services has a vision to simplify medical billing for every practitioner. It believes that billing should be hassle-free and easy. That is why it takes all the burden of documentation and claim filing from your shoulders so that you can focus solely on providing the best patient care.
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