What Is Skilled Nursing Facility Revenue Cycle Management

The idea of a revenue cycle in health care is very basic. It consists of the collection, analysis and reporting of data from patients to physicians to payers to centers to help service providers determine the best practices for each step of the process. Revenue cycle management includes all of these actions and more. It likewise involves making use of data from all of these actions to figure out where the spaces are in the procedure and how they can be filled.

The secret to enhancing a revenue cycle is to learn what's working and what's not. By identifying areas where the process is broken, you can make changes that will improve the effectiveness of the procedure and eventually increase your revenues. Here are some typical issues with revenue cycles and how to fix them.

Collection

Lots of facilities struggle with gathering the suitable amounts of cash from patients and their insurance companies. This is particularly true if the patient has personal insurance or if they are self-pay. Many times the facilities are missing out on payments that need to have been gathered. This leads to lost revenue and an inefficient process.

To fix this issue, you need to initially comprehend what the most common factors why the facility doesn't gather adequate money. You need to look at the information to see which elements are leading to under collection. The facility needs to work more difficult to get those clients back to fill out the kinds again.

Analysis

As soon as you've determined the problem with collection, you require to evaluate the data to determine how to correct it. The initial step in this procedure is to comprehend the reasons why the facility is under-collecting. Once you have that details, you can then look at the information to see what can be done to correct the issue.

If they're not coming back, you require to find out why. Or possibly the personnel needs to be advised of what is expected.

Reporting

After examining the data to determine the issues, you need to learn how to repair them. To do this, you need to identify the data that is needed to monitor the success of the program. For instance, if you are using incentives to encourage patients to return their forms, you need to track how well that is working. You likewise need to track how much cash the facility is losing because of this problem.

As soon as you have this information, you need to find out what metrics to track. You may want to measure how long it takes for the client to return the form after being advised. Or you might wish to look at the number of kinds are really returned by the patient. After you have the information, you need to figure how to report on it so that you can see what is happening. You may decide that you want to send out monthly reports to show progress. Or you may decide that you desire quarterly reports to tell you what is going on in your facility.

Once you know what to measure, you need to figure out how to measure it. Or you may ask the staff to provide you with a list of all of the patients who never returned the form. This is a list of patients that you need to call and follow up with.

When you have a plan in place, you need to implement it. That implies training the staff to use the metrics that you have selected. You need to set a goal for yourself to meet. You may say that you want to reduce the number of patients who never return their forms by 50% within 6 months. If you can do this, you will have increased your revenue.

Conclusion

By following these steps, you will be able to increase your revenue and improve the revenue cycle. You will likewise be able to improve the quality of care that you provide to your patients.

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