A multitude of factors drive or influence your medical practice revenue, including claims management, patient payments, and your in-house billing workflow. Each of these largely impacts whether a provider sees on-time payments and can stabilize their medical practice revenue bottom-line year-to-year.
Without the right tools, providers might find it difficult to maintain high levels of clean claims, adjust to an increasing dependence on patient payments, or effectively manage their billing in house. For this reason, providers need to consider the following tactics for increasing and stabilizing their medical practice revenue. Doing so may not only help sustain but improve it dramatically.
Medical Practice Revenue Tactics:
1) Collect Difficult Patient Payments
With the rise of High Deductible Health Plans, providers might find themselves in unfamiliar territory. You may not be used to having to chase patients for payments rather than receiving them from large entity payers like insurance companies.
Many smaller practices lack the resources, both financially and in terms of manpower, to run an in-house collections effort. The good news is that outsourcing difficult collections to a trusted Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) services vendor may be a solution to increasing your revenue and collecting those difficult payments.
Vendors of RCM services have the time, resources, and compassion it takes to receive the payments your practice needs to improve its medical practice revenue.
2) Improve Clean Claims
A clean claim is a medical claim that is submitted correctly the first time, leading to a faster turnaround on payment than when a claim is rejected or denied. Submitting a clean claim directly relates to how quickly a provider receives payment from an insurance provider.
It is important that providers maximize their clean claims rate to protect and optimize timely payments and positively impact their medical practice revenue. The quickest, most affordable way to do so is to partner with an RCM services vendor or practice management technology partner that specializes in clean claims.
Together, they will work with your team to scrub your claims and determine the most common causes for denials at your practice, so you can start to improve your clean claims rate and improve your revenue flow.
3) Specialty-Tailored Billing Software
Specialty-specific billing software is the next path that providers can take to increase their medical practice revenue and grow their bottom line.
Many software vendors offer a “one-size-fits-all” solution that fails to meet the needs of specialists. These ill-fitting systems can slow down your billing workflow and prevent your practice from working at its best.
Your medical billing software should help your team to work more effectively, not slow you down. By implementing specialty-specific software, providers can access tailored billing tools, like coding and claim-filing tools that help your practice optimize their medical practice revenue and bypass unnecessary information.
4) Improved Scheduling
Improved scheduling is an incredibly important part of improving your medical practice revenue.
Many providers are still experiencing high numbers of no-show visits that negatively impact their bottom line. Whether their patients are forgetting, their scheduling workflow is not working, or they have low levels of patient loyalty, improving scheduling is necessary to move forward.
By reducing no-shows, providers bill more for completed services, complete more follow-up care with their patients, and are not wasting their time when their patients do not show up.
Improved scheduling can be accomplished through quality practice management software with an integrated patient portal. With the right software, providers can improve their scheduling numbers, reduce no-shows, and positively impact their medical practice revenue.
5) Give Your Patients Options
The days of mailing in payments no longer exist. Your patients need more options if you want them to make more payments.
Patients want to pay their medical bills just as they would pay their rent or their electric bill—online or over the phone. Without accessible options like this, patients will forget or even avoid making payments on their medical bills, negatively impacting your medical practice revenue.
Again, the right software can help your practice offer patients 24/7-accessible payment options. Medical billing software that is integrated into a patient portal allows for day and night credit card processing that allows a patient to make a payment whenever they need to, benefiting your medical practice revenue.
If you’re ready to learn more about medical billing software, see what CollaborateMD can do for your practice!