New Generation Revenue Cycle Management: Cut RCM Costs

WRS Health recently produced a white paper titled, “New Generation Revenue Cycle Management: Not Your Grandmother’s Billing System,” which examines new, cloud-based revenue cycle management tools for medical practices. Today, in part five of our six part blog series, we examine how new generation RCM tools can help a practice reduce its operating costs.

Part 5

New generation RCM enables physicians to hire fewer staffers. Joseph Flint, M.D., a solo practitioner at Delavan Pediatrics in Illinois said, “I am more efficient because all of the insurance information and codes that I enter in the note, auto-populate. I am the billing person at this time. There’s just not a lot of time required. My system saves me money because I don’t need to hire a billing person.”

Cutting Costs with Integration

Dr. Flint added, “I was really looking for a Cloud EMR with the ability for charting and billing to be connected easily—a seamless connection. I like the integration. I was looking at another company that had charting, but you had to go with another company to do the billing. They were somewhat integrated but if you didn’t register the patient in one system first, you’d have to go through and register them in the other one so you’d have to remember which way to do it. My system saves a lot of time when you register the patient, do your chart and create a claim. It populates the claim form automatically. Only a few modifications have to be made.”

Using separate software modules from different companies can drain a practice’s finances. Jeffrey Kunkes, M.D. said, “Before we were using a different module and we had to hire a billing company. We were spending $4,000 a month between billing, collections and medical records. When we switched to a Cloud EMR with an integrated billing module we’ve saved $2,000 to $3,000 a month. Because everything is under one company, we have saved the hidden costs of billing and collecting, going from one screen to another and printing things. We’ve been able to cut our printing and copying costs significantly. We have saved a significant amount of money on billing and collection without missing a step.”

Cutting Costs with Automation

Placing patient statements in envelopes, affixing postage and then sending them in the mail is a drag on office staff’s efficiency and it can substantially delay payments. Automatic patient statement generation enables patient balances to be sent on a weekly basis. When statements are automatically enveloped, stamped and mailed, this eliminates the need for your staff to run statements once a month. When payment isn’t received in a timely fashion, successive dunning letters can be sent automatically until payment is received.

This process includes data setup, printing, stuffing envelopes, affixing postage and taking them to the post office on a monthly basis. This process has become passé. Today’s systems typically offer an automated connection to an electronic statement service. All data gathering, printing and mail is done out-of-house. This approach offers a great level of practice control and saves a great deal of money.