Every month you buy groceries, toiletries, cleaning supplies and pay bills for which you allocate a monthly budget. However, you sometimes tend to exceed this budget—blame it on inflation, or supply scarcity. Your friend tells you about an application which could help you plan and track the amount you spend. It can also give you a detailed breakup of all items you will need to buy each month. This is an example of how analytics can make your life easier.
Much like your household expenses which are at the mercy of inflation and other external factors (like produce availability), the US healthcare industry is also very dynamic with constantly changing regulations. That’s why providing healthcare services and getting paid for them can be a challenge. A revenue cycle management (RCM) dashboard helps you deal with this issue by streamlining processes and reducing labor costs. Take a step further and generate profits using your existing workflows by leveraging your healthcare data analytics.
The role of RCM analytics is to map the end-to-end revenue lifecycle right from the first appointment until the final bill clearance—it provides insights into the workflow of the revenue generation process. Based on this insight, you can improve or speed up operations.
RCM Analytics and Its Benefits
The role of analytics in RCM is diverse so we’ve laid out some ways in which it can help you.
Assessing Process Performance
Let’s revisit the household budget example. When you have a detailed breakup of the items you need to buy under each category, you can adjust (reduce or increase) the expenditure, so you don’t exceed your monthly budget.
Healthcare setups earn revenue from claim settlements and other overhead charges. Any error in coding and billing can impact the entire RCM process. Analytics software can offer a detailed breakdown of your financial activities to help you make informed business decisions. It can help you streamline coding, billing and other processes by taking any necessary steps—your team can implement these steps in the workflow and increase revenue.
Real-Time and Actionable Insights
You forget to pay your electricity bill and a late fee is levied on the total bill amount—monthly budget exceeds the limit as late fee is an unplanned expense. Imagine this: the budget planning application lets you add reminders which not only notify you about the bill payment due dates, but also help allocate some amount towards such emergencies.
Actionable insights are perhaps one of the biggest RCM analytics benefits. Healthcare analytics dashboards can reveal the gaps in your processes that are causing revenue leakage. You can use real-time insights to fill those gaps. For instance, if you are experiencing a high number of claim denials, the analytics software will help pin down the challenges in pre-submission processes. As a result, your team can easily work towards reducing claim denials. You can also maximize your team’s productivity using real-time insights. For instance, you can regulate the number of manhours spent completing a task or automate cyclic activities.
Easy Integration with Other Applications
Consider this: You can use the budgeting application to make online payments whenever you shop for groceries, toiletries, cleaning supplies or pay bills. Convenient, right?
Healthcare systems must integrate with custom solutions like RCM analytics software. The data exchange between different applications will facilitate smoother functioning of day-to-day operations. Analytics software lets you have a bird’s-eye view of all workflows and empower your teams to make informed decisions with regards to process management.
Generate Custom Reports
Now, imagine the budgeting application generates a detailed report of your expenditure towards the end of the month. The report also tells you how much you have saved and where you have overspent.
A healthcare institution deals with large amounts of data on a daily basis—generating reports manually can be a tedious task.
An analytics tool lets you access custom reports. For instance, you can view a summary of claims which includes denied, outstanding and reimbursed amounts. Thankfully, these softwares operate on a cloud-based platform allowing you to access them on your personal device.
Using RCM analytics softwares are important if you want to improve your business’ financial performance and focus on quality patient care.
HelioNext’s RCM analytics dashboard is a comprehensive revenue cycle management tool—it lets you manage payments, access real-time performance insights and save time from manual reporting. Transform your revenue cycle; get in touch with us.