Delivering high-quality patient care is the primary goal for physicians. But declining reimbursements and tighter margins mean that physician practices must also prioritize revenue cycle optimization. If a practice fails financially, it can’t keep its doors open to care for patients.
To ensure the health of your practice, you need the right tools and processes. Recording charges completely and accurately is the foundation of revenue cycle optimization. But the fast pace of healthcare practices today makes it difficult to avoid common revenue cycle errors, such as:
- Incomplete progress notes. Notes that are unsigned, undated or lack sufficient detail require additional processing time on the part of billing staff and physicians.
- Unauthenticated medical records. Without physician or supervising signatures, identification of illegible signatures or electronic record protocol to document electronic signatures, the billing process cannot be completed.
- Incomplete or missing documentation. Does your administrative staff have sufficient progress notes and clinical documentation? Does documentation show that the physician or advanced practice practitioner first tried conservative medical management, but it failed or was contraindicated?
- Missing imaging or lab work. Have your physicians provided the evidence that supports the medical necessity of each procedure?
Best Practices for Optimizing Charge Capture and Revenue Cycle
If your practice is experiencing any of these errors, there are steps you can take to improve documentation, reduce unnecessary time spent fixing errors, avoid audits and fines and optimize the financial health of your practice.
You can optimize your organization’s ability to submit accurate and timely bills for the care provided by your physicians by adhering to these best practices:
- Educate physicians to code accurately and understand that completely documenting all care is their responsibility – not that of support staff.
- Enable physicians to optimize the revenue cycle by giving them purpose-built tools that make it easier for them to capture charges accurately and quickly at the point of care.
- Stop shipping or faxing the necessary documentation in favor of electronic record keeping.
- Use a secure digital image to make clinical notes immediately accessible where EHR integrations aren’t feasible.
- Conduct internal audits of charge capture records annually to monitor and enhance the cost-effectiveness of your operations.
Ingenious Med offers easily implemented, point-of-care tools to help physicians and health systems adhere to best practices, optimize the revenue cycle, automate workflows and gain more insights from their data, enabling organizations to thrive in both fee-for-service and value-based models.
Don’t risk losing revenue because it’s challenging for your physicians to accurately record and bill for their services when they deliver care, or make your coding team use valuable time finding and correcting errors. Following the best practices of revenue cycle optimization will demonstrably increase the number of charges captured as well as provide a more accurate representation of what care has actually been provided. ROI studies from Ingenious Med clients found that using our solution increased the mean number of charges per patient by 7 percent.
Ingenious Med founder Steve Liu, MD, explained the business case for charge capture in this Becker’s Hospital Review article. With an average ROI of 14x, a typical payback period of six months and an average annual revenue increase per physician of $30,000, adding Ingenious Med tools to your EHR makes sense. With just four data points, our revenue cycle optimization calculator shows the impact of missing charges on your practice.
To learn more about how your organization can benefit from the revenue cycle optimization solutions developed by Ingenious Med, contact a sales representative at 770.799.0909 or visit ingeniousmed.com/demo.