Urgent care centers serve as effective intermediary medical offices between emergency rooms and primary care physician’s clinics. Patients rely on urgent care facilities to get an emergency medical service to treat any critical issue, which does not necessarily need the advanced resources of an emergency room in a hospital. Revenue cycle management in such facilities can be challenging since they often harbor a high-end bill, though they do not have long-term patients. Revenue cycle management vendors specifically dealing with urgent care facilities believe that they need to upgrade their RCM tools and medical billing workflow frequently to keep up with a regular cash flow.
Flexibility and responsiveness are two top qualities that the in-house billing teams must possess to deal with the different kinds of patients in an urgent care facility setup. However, they must also look out for the regulatory evolutions as federal instructions keep on changing in frequent time intervals. With the ongoing pandemic, the billing and coding teams need to work with the upgraded revenue cycle management tools. Here are the five most valuable tips for managing billing in an urgent care center from leading revenue cycle management vendors.
Price Transparency
- The price transparency rule effective from January 2021 requires all hospitals to post a machine-readable file on their website, which the patients can access to know the prices for the different medical services in a shoppable format.
- The prices mentioned on the website should include the payer-negotiated fees for all services offered in the organization.
- Therefore, price transparency is a crucial factor that the patients are looking forward to when deciding on their medical service. It is also a positive step forward in making affordable hospital care accessible to all while promoting price competition.
- Transparent prices of services under the urgent care facility and adjustments of the insurance rules can help increase the patients’ speed to pay. Hosting a valuable tool on the website could improve the patient’s overall experience and keep the cash flow steady.
Self Payments Online
- People in recent times are used to paying for every commercial service online. Medical services should not fall behind in this game.
- Your website must have self-payment portals where the patients can log in and pay their dues while accessing the complete break-up of their out-of-pocket expenditures.
- However, with the increasing number of high deductible plans in recent years, the out-of-pocket expenditures often mount up to a great extent which is often difficult for the patients to pay at once.
- Self-serve payment portals can also provide the patients with installment guidelines that they can use according to their health plans. Information like financial assistance and the status of their deductible on the same portal could give the patients a better view of their options, which will ultimately help keep the revenue cycle management strong.
Leveraging Artificial Intelligence Tools
- Artificial intelligence tools enhance your performance when you deal with a significant load of medical bills simultaneously. Advanced medical billing and coding software solutions used by revenue cycle management vendors help their team excel at their job while eliminating manual errors.
- The tools are designed in a way to support end-to-end revenue cycle management in a healthcare organization. This means you can enhance your patient’s experience from the moment they step into your office and submit their details.
- For example, a patient can walk into your urgent care facility and tell you their insurance details. You can enter them into your AI system and let them know which services are covered by their health plans, even before the service takes place.
- This transparent method of interaction assists the patients in a better way while you have all the necessary details to move forward with the account. In case of an error in the patient demographic entry, the tools will show you immediately where you are going wrong so that the error does not carry forward to the next steps in the revenue cycle.
Denial Management
- High denial rates could harm the financial health of your organization in more ways than you can imagine. This is the reason why leading revenue cycle management vendors take special care to keep the denial rates in check.
- Most healthcare organizations with poor rates of clean claim processing end up having large amounts of revenue stuck in the cycle. Since long-term patients are lesser in number in an urgent care facility, it is vital for the billing team to get the claims clean in the first attempt.
- Surveys show that most healthcare organizations, including urgent care facilities, lose out on massive chunks of revenue while contesting claims. Regulating the existing workflow to process cleaner claims and taking proper steps to appeal the denied claims will help in improving the cash flow in the organization.
- Some advanced software tools offered by experienced revenue cycle management vendors cover these aspects of the job. Not only do they monitor the existing denials, but they also give data-driven insights into the historical cash flow of the organization so that the management is better equipped to take further decisions.
Trusting the Experts
- Every healthcare system, like urgent care organizations, multispecialty hospitals, and independent clinics, has unique needs with respect to managing its revenue cycle.
- While in-house billing teams have professionals on board, short-staffing keeps them from looking into each specialized aspect of the revenue cycle at once. Expert revenue cycle management vendors could help you excel at your workflow with the help of their assigned teams.
- The revenue cycle management companies take care of end-to-end services in RCM. But you could also approach them with a specific concern, and they would have you covered with their specific teams.
- Revenue cycle management vendors have decades of experience dealing with different kinds of healthcare setups. Get in touch with a leading RCM company that can take care of your specific issues and evaluates your financial health.
We hope this article helped you with useful tips to upgrade the revenue cycle management at your urgent care facility. Please connect with us in the comment section below in case of any queries. Subscribe to our blog for regular articles on the medical billing industry. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more.