Revenue Cycle Management: How to Optimize Your Claims Management

Revenue Cycle Management encapsulates all of your home health or hospice agency’s billing practices from intake to claims processing. Optimizing the claims management process is an essential part of developing an effective way for your agency to acquire the payouts that it’s owed for services rendered. Mitigating potential issues that you face in receiving reimbursement will help your agency run more smoothly and reduce the amount you have to utilize from loans or bonds to make payments to keep your agency operational. Therefore, optimizing claims management is often a critical concern for executives managing home health and hospice agencies. We have developed a few tips to help, which you can find below. 

Developing a System for Maintaining Accuracy and Quickly Mitigating Errors 

It is of the utmost importance that all of the data that you have on file for your agency is free of errors and is accurate and up to date. Make sure that you have an effective system in place for maintaining accuracy in all of your patient records. Small, avoidable errors can be very costly for agencies, as they can lead to unnecessary claims denials and issues in attempting to collect on the claims being processed in a timely fashion. Find ways to ensure that your staff are able to adequately and consistently track accurate patient data, which begins at intake. You can make this transition simpler and more effective for them by ensuring that you are utilizing a good software solution that supports them in acquiring the information that they need while also remaining compliant. 

Utilizing Technology for Automation and to Reduce Tedious Manual Entry 

In addition to helping your staff to accurately and systematically input patient data, the right software solution can help reduce tedious tasks and avoidable delays based on the time required to engage in manual entry of information. Finding ways for your staff to complete their work more quickly and more efficiently will not only benefit your agency from an RCM perspective, but it will also help with various other aspects of your agency’s productivity and workflow - such as caregiver retention and satisfaction. 

Go Paperless to Reduce Errors and Delays in Claims Payouts 

Another great way to help your agency with claims processing is to go paperless. This requires that you find a software solution which supports this goal, but it will be very beneficial to keep all of your claims processes electronic so that you can more efficiently manage each phase of the reimbursement process. Software solutions exist that support you in not only going paperless, but also in remaining compliant, utilizing electronic visit verification, and more.