Patient Experience Across Revenue Cycle Management: It Counts in Cash
Over the 18 years I’ve been in the healthcare outsourcing field of RCM, I’ve learned efficiency in healthcare billing doesn’t have to be complicated. Although many trends have come and gone, there are 5 key rules that drive highly successful people to consistently exceed expectations and are very straightforward, more so than you may imagine. So let’s count it down:
5. Cohesion – Values and culture act as a North Star on the path to accomplishing our goals. Aligning outsource partners with your internal values creates a unified team with vision and priorities. In our case, as a RCM outsourcing provider, we adopt and look to absorb our client’s culture. A successful partnership is cohesive and transparent with effective communication and trust flowing in both directions.
4. Expertise – Of course, this seems straightforward but healthcare business process outsourcing is immensely encompassing when we delve a little deeper. True expertise in healthcare RCM goes far beyond the hard mechanics such as compliance and efficiency. True expertise includes factors such as empathy (identifying with patients on a personal level, understand to what they are going through). It is having the emotional acumen to respectfully guide a positive resolution, helping the patients, their families and our partners to smoothly navigate the path to recovery.
3. Technology – Pressure will continue to be applied to budgets driving the need for efficiency, automation, and analytics providing insight to the changing conditions ahead. With the right platform effectiveness of a team can be realized, quantified and refined. With the proper balance of People, Process and Technology phenomenal performance gains can be made. Though, in seeking efficacy multipliers such as these, it is important to never lose sight of the patient relationship.
2. Relationship – With the easing of manual processes, it is crucial to leverage human capital intelligently. Performance in the healthcare RCM space and the patient relationship are directly intertwined. The key, focusing the right resources where they count and in turn driving the most valuable level of care and relationship to successfully cure past due balances. The better the patient relationship, the better the payment metrics. The better the payment metrics, the better the client relationship. As we know, patient satisfaction is highly correlated to a patient’s choice physician and facility should they require care in the future. Which leads us to rule #1:
1. Patient Experience – Parents, grandparents, spouses, friends, family and loved ones. The person on the other side of phone calls or correspondence may be anyone these, and under a different set of circumstances it could be you or me on the other side this exchange. Make the conversation matter. Make it bigger than just a call to recover a bill. Raising the bar to what a positive patient experience is. All of the previous rules lead to this point. Patient Experience is the number one priority which multiplies all others including desire to pay. Focus on delivering an informative, helpful, compliant, valuable and pleasant patient experience and all other key metrics will rise as well
Patient Experience is the key to greater collections in healthcare, and through my 18 years in the field, these are the essentials to excelling in Revenue Cycle Management that I’ve found most effective for our clients, our teams and myself.
– Erin Wilson, Healthcare BPO Project Manager of VWi
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