Revenue Cycle Management 101

What is Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)?

In healthcare, revenue cycle management — RCM — is the entire process of identifying, managing, and collecting patient service revenue. It covers all the administrative and clinical functions associated with the revenue cycle, from preregistration to full payment for services rendered.

The revenue cycle

Full revenue cycle management in urgent care covers the entire revenue cycle process, which includes:

• Preregistration – collection of patient information (like insurance info) before the patient arrives (often through online patient engagement)
• Registration – collection of patient information not captured in the preregistration
• Charge capture – translating medical services into billable charges
• Coding – accurately coding the visit
• Claim submission – submitting billable fees to insurance companies
• Remittance processing – patient billing and resolution
• Insurance follow-up – collecting payment from insurers
• Patient collections – collecting outstanding/late balances

You can find more information on these individual processes in the section “How do I Optimize my Revenue Cycle Management.”

The revenue cycle management process

Successful revenue cycle management takes technology, perfected standard operating procedures, well-trained staff, and a third-party billing service.

Technology can help you reduce exceptions, improve efficiency, increase accuracy, and stay compliant. Most automated billing tools are integrated into practice management software. We expand on this a bit further in the last section on RCM software.

Your standard operating procedures will align staff on appropriate actions to take. Note that you should establish best practices in each area of the revenue cycle and include those in your SOP. Learn about best practices in the section “How do I Optimize my Revenue Cycle Management.”

Training your staff should be ongoing and touch multiple areas. The front desk is responsible for handling most of the revenue cycle, and they need to understand how to identify and avoid common mistakes, as well as feel comfortable asking patients for payment. In addition, your providers need to be trained on accurate coding — something that has been a challenge since COVID-19.

While some smaller clinics can manage urgent care billing on their own, some find it more cost-effective to have place billing management in the hands of billing company with expertise in healthcare versus adding a designated billing specialist to the team. At a certain growth point, using a reputable medical billing company will simply be the easiest and most profitable way to manage your actual billing.  If you have a trusted RCM partner, chances are good they can provide that service as well.

Is Medical Billing Another Name for Revenue Cycle Management?

While medical billing and RCM are sometimes used synonymously, they are not exactly the same. Medical billing refers to submitting and following up on claims. It’s part of the RCM process, but does not necessarily speak to all the other factors that contribute to getting paid in full, on time.

What’s important about this distinction is the ability to optimize your billing process. For example, of the 400+ billing audits the RCM experts from Experity have performed, most clinics were confident in their ability to get claims out and post cash efficiently. And while they were right, those tasks only account for about 30% to 40% of the revenue cycle.  By mistaking RCM for just billing, they were blind to numerous gaps that were delaying payment.

So while medical billing is an important part of revenue cycle management, full revenue cycle management covers all the steps that your staff and patients take that lead to you getting paid. Revenue cycle management software typically refers to functionality within your PM, while RCM covers every step in the revenue cycle process from billing and claims submission and resolution to expertise and best practices that will improve RCM operations.

How do I Improve my Revenue Cycle Management Process?

Measuring your KPIs will help you see where to improve, but they don’t tell you how. Here are some actionable tips that our experts recommend to help your staff optimize the full revenue cycle.

Preregistration and Registration

Registration and eligibility errors are the single biggest reason for exceptions. This is a great place to start when you’re optimizing your process. Offering the ability for patients to preregister online will not only save precious time for your staff, but also help reduce data input errors. Once the patient is at the clinic, your staff can also utilize insurance eligibility features like Real Time Eligibility (RTE) or Real Time Verification (RTV). This will tell you immediately if the patient’s insurance coverage includes the service. Most importantly, your staff needs to have an action plan for when RTE or RTV shows that the patient is not covered. Coach your staff to either ask for a credit card or set up a payment plan.

Charge Capture and Coding

When the American Medical Association came out with new coding guidelines for COVID-19 in 2021, it was the first time in 25 years providers have had to learn new codes — and keep up with frequent changes to them. The best way to ensure that your coding is always accurate is to provide ongoing training. Experity is diligent about offering webinars and other resources to help clarify what medical services translate to which billable charges:

This blog is regularly updated to reflect the most recent E/M codes for COVID-19.

This downloadable PDF simplifies the information in the above blog.

This on-demand webinar talks through some of the most confusing coding situations related to COVID-19.

Claim Submission

If your front desk is doing thorough work on the front end, and your providers are documenting accurately, your claims will already be cleaner. To further perfect the process, identify the most common mistakes made when submitting claims, and build best practices around identifying these mistakes and correcting them before submitting the claims.

Insurance Follow-up

This is often considered the dirty work of RCM. If you want to get paid, you need to have a protocol to call or submit an online inquiry to insurance companies for payments. We recommend that for each payer, you establish a cadence to follow-up every 30-45 days. Reserve time to do this follow up and set separate cadences for each payer — you don’t want to get backlogged on work by contacting everyone on the same day every month.

Patient Collections

This is another difficult area for many clinics because few people like to ask patients for money. Two things you can do to be better about this are A) find out which staff is most comfortable doing this, and B) coach them with a script so they know how to go about it. For example:

“Hi, how are you – sorry you’re not feeling well. Ok Let’s see. You have a $25 dollar copay. Want to give me your credit card and I’ll take care of it? Oh! I see from the last time you were here, you owe $10. Is it OK if I just go ahead and put that on here as well?”

BONUS TIP: Use credit card on file to eliminate clunky processes. With a stored credit card, you just need permission from the patients to use that card for balances owed, circumventing extra conversations.

Get more tips on RCM SOP best practices in this urgent care billing optimization blog >>

RCM Software and Services

In this day and age, it doesn’t really make sense to not rely on software in your urgent care business. You’d have to be a pretty small clinic to not benefit from RCM applications in your practice management software. They help you optimize your revenue and reduce workloads for your staff. Aside from that, your patients are used to the conveniences of technology. If you’re adding pain to their experience by making it feel archaic, they may not return if given a choice.

In the same vein, finances and payments are of the most difficult aspects any consumer has to deal with. In healthcare, it’s even less fun. So as part of your overall RCM, finding ways to make paying bills easier is a huge boon for you.

Here are some features that you can find in a modern RCM services:

• RTE or RTV
• Credit card on file
• Payment processing
• Coding recommendations
• Payer contracting and credentialing
• Invoicing
• Rejection and denial management
• SMS text capabilities (e.g., text balance reminders)
• Expert support

Ultimately, you want RCM functionality within your EMR/PM and an integrated RCM service to handle medical billing. For the best return on investment, you want to work with an RCM vendor who acts as more of a partner than retailer. We saw how quickly everything changed with COVID-19. Some clinics weathered those changes better than others because their solutions partners were working closely with them to provide necessary support and functionality.

If you’re ready to demo RCM services, we’d love to show you what Experity can do for you. Simply fill out a request and we will take it from there. But if you’re on the fence, we can still make this easy. Our RCM health check is not a sales pitch. It’s a free service to show you where you can make improvements in your RCM. So you not only get a chance to know us better, you walk away with actionable advice.  Are you ready for a better year?

Yes, Show Me How to Better My RCM I’m Actually Ready to Demo