Revenue management is essential to the health care industry, as it helps manage claims, and controls payment and cash flow. It ensures that the billing process goes smoothly to generate adequate revenue to invest further in your business. Therefore, your practice should always be striving to improve revenue cycle management. Here are a few ways you can better revenue management to build a more profitable practice: 1. Keep track of Medicare payments It's not unusual for Medicare to delay payments to providers, which could result in money lost for your practice. The reason behind the delay could be due to a claim that was improperly coded or insufficient documentation. Be sure to identify the exact date that Medicare stops or delays payment. This way, your practice can take the appropriate steps to receive those payments that are due. Your practice can enroll in a medical review program, which consists of a clinician or certified coder reviewing Medicare claims to reduce payment error. They identify and address billing errors regarding coverage and coding.

We've posted previously about the benefits of e-eligibility services for specialists. The core reason for adopting an e-eligibility service is that it enables a practice to communicate accurately to patients, prior to administering care, their responsibility for the cost of care. Having that determined early on paves the way for collecting up-front patient payments – a practice steadily gaining momentum as patients take a more active role in paying for their healthcare.

We recently blogged about best practices for electronic eligibility (e-eligibility) as a means to protect a practice’s revenue cycle by minimizing the need for post-care patient collections. Similarly for specialists who rely on insurance reimbursements from public or private payers, a clearinghouse electronic remittance (e-remittance) service is essential to making sure the practice receives full compensation from payers for services rendered. Healthcare payers have successfully reduced paper communications with providers, along with associated costs, by instituting automated transaction processing and electronic data interchange initiatives. Physicians are on the receiving end of those electronic transfers in the form of electronic remittance advice (ERA) reports and electronic funds transfer (EFT) receipts, often manually entering the data they contain into practice financial systems.

Elective Surgery physicians are often daunted with the task of competing for new patients. Because elective surgery works on an “opt-in” basis, physicians find themselves having to aggressively market to their target audience. Whether it is done through television, radio, newspaper or online, physicians must actively compete for business in an age where the Internet has made choosing a doctor as simple as online shopping. When a doctor’s marketing tactics pay off in the form of a lead, it is up to the doctor and the staff to close the loop on converting the lead into a new patient.