The money owed to you by patients is called accounts receivable and it is the most important part of the revenue cycle management for a health practice. The better you manage your accounts, the greater your cash flow will be. However, you will need to be diligent to ensure that your accounts receivable is running as efficiently as possible.

If you allow your AR management to go lax, the result is not having your patients paying their bills in timely manner or worse, not paying them at all. Your cash flow will start to dwindle and before you know it your practice may be in such a hole that it becomes difficult, if not impossible to get out.

So, you will need the right policies and personnel in place to ensure that your revenue cycle management is running as smoothly as possible. This is especially true in this day and age of new healthcare reforms and different ways that patients can now pay. What was once traditional and reliable has now changed considerably when it comes to collecting your payments. So, you will need to put into place processes that will maximize the efficiency of your cash flow.

Three Ways to Improve Revenue Cycle Management

Remove Outdated Patient Information: Any outdated information should not be kept so that it does not get mixed in with relevant data. Be sure to have your staff verify insurance card data and all other relevant information each time they are scheduled for an appointment.

Clean up Billing: Basically, you will want to get rid of small expenditures such as reimbursement for vaccines from a defunct payer or any missed co-pay from a patient who is deceased. By taking care of these little things, you will not be wasting the time and energy of your staff chasing after them through continuous billing practices.

Date of Service Collection: Ensure that your existing balances are collected when the service is delivered and not just sending a bill to your patients. You will need to use the right collection methods and take any legal actions necessary to get money from your regular patients.

By taking care of these three items, you can go a long way towards improving your revenue cycle management practices. You will want to regularly review them in order to catch anything that might start to slow down the efficiency of your bill collecting. Remember that it will take time to properly train your staff and to allocate the resources necessary to ensure that your revenue or AR management is working to peak efficiency.

The good news is that you can use outside or third party sources to help you in this process. By hiring the best professionals in revenue cycle management, you are putting the best in place to oversee your cash flow while paying less than if you hired an individual to do the job. So, be sure you take in all the pertinent information and make the right decision about hiring the best to oversee your billing practices.