Revenue Cycle Management

One of the major parts of business is ensuring that you are being paid for services rendered. This can be a painful process; some clients just don’t seem to want to pay. There are numerous things you can do to ensure revenue comes in, one essential process to employ is revenue cycle management. While this may sound complicated, the idea is simple: Taking steps to assure that you get paid in a timely fashion.

As you likely know, the revenue cycle starts long before you see a patient. It actually begins when the patient calls to make an appointment, at which time you must capture crucial information, including the patient’s name, contact information and, insurance number or policy information. The cycle continues throughout the appointment and doesn’t end until the balance on the patient’s account is zero; they have paid their bill.

As you might have guessed data gathering is essential to successful revenue cycle management. In many countries, the largest part of this cycle, and the most important data needed revolves around a patient’s insurance. This information needs to be gathered and verified before his or her appointment.

You may feel you simply don’t have the time to spend making phone calls, faxes or even emails to verify insurance before the patient arrives. This is really a crucial step that can’t be skipped, if you do miss this step, you have to verify insurance when the patient checks in, and that’s inefficient because it adds to the amount of time a patient is in the office, therefore decreasing the number of patients you can see. Any snafu will put the whole office’s schedule behind for the day.

If you verifying the patient’s insurance before his or her appointment, however, you can easily correct any problems before the appointment—rescheduling the patient, for example, or getting correct coverage information. With the correct information, you can better manage a large percentage of your revenue cycle, and may even reduce the time it takes for you to earn revenue.

One of the better ways to manage the revenue cycle is through the use of a fully integrated practice management solution like gloCare from gloStream. If you are looking for a better way to not only manage your revenue but your whole practice, please contact us today to see how we can help.