Does Fancy New Technology Help?

What’s the best way to optimize your provider medical revenue cycle?

Some experienced administrators of medical offices would smile grimly at you when you ask this question and say – “is this a riddle?”

They know that it’s not an easy answer, and they’re also aware of some of the stock answers that people give to this question.

The reasons for problems with medical revenue cycles are manifold – they can have to do with the current insurance reporting process, the documentation process, the contractual agreements that each medical provider has with each insurance company, and other frustrating and aggravating aspects of clinical management.

So what about the promise of new technologies?

Electronic Health Records

Although EHRs were supposed to revolutionize clinical workflows when introduced years ago, that has not extended to revenue cycles for a lot of providers, despite the promotion of these tools through the federal HITECH Act and the hype around digitizing clinical data.

An EHR can help automate diagnostic codes or chart notes, but it doesn’t typically help with collecting small bits of money from cash-strapped households, or going to the mat with big insurance companies to get thousands of dollars released for a given medical procedure. That essentially takes good old-fashioned detective work and follow-up – things that humans do, with deliberation and decision-making.

Using Artificial Intelligence

Now some of the most prominent voices in the medical community are asking if we can use artificial intelligence to manage revenue cycles.

Again, maybe AI can help streamline some of these processes that suffer from data being held in silos or isolated from its useful destination. But there’s still a human element to medical revenue cycle management that evades a lot of offices.

Let’s look at two of the major problems with medical revenue cycles. The first one, according to some experts, could be called “revenue cycle leakage,” which sounds more visceral than it is. Essentially, money is falling out of the pipeline due to problems with successful documentation and questions over who is responsible to pay.

The second one is the patient financial experience, which really tells you all you have to know about medical practice management today. Providers are stuck trying to get co-pays, deductibles and other amounts of money from households where people have already gone to the doctor and left the office. People get bills in the mail, and they throw them directly in the trash can. Part of the painstaking work of revenue cycle improvement is to deal with that fact. It’s that simple.

Let Zenith help you to optimize your medical revenue cycle for the future!

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