The healthcare industry is fast becoming a money-consuming business due to factors like crushing administrative burden, rising operating costs, and lawsuits every other day. Staying afloat and turning a profit has become a daily challenge.
Here are management tips and tricks that healthcare providers can use to grow revenues.
Renegotiate Your Payor Contracts
One major key to increasing revenue is by ensuring correct reimbursement promptly with proper payor contract management. The fact is that many home care provider organizations are leaving money on the table with inefficient and infrequent payer contract management because of the complexity associated with negotiating and managing multiple payor contracts.
This is a mistake that is costing numerous healthcare providers tons of revenue. As a healthcare provider, so, if you have the data to show that your practice is cost-effectively getting great care outcomes, you have the leverage to go back to payors and ask for a better pay raise or more favorable rates.
Now, while organizations can do this on their own, payor contracts contain complex clauses, amendments, and legalese, that requires either an in-depth understanding or the easier route of hiring companies that negotiate insurance contracts. So, the return on investment (ROI) from hiring a team of professionals who negotiate such contracts for a living will be well worth the cost.
Build An Online Presence
With a huge chunk of patients now consulting the internet for healthcare information and relying on online reviews to find new doctors, healthcare providers who are not online via websites or social media handles are losing revenue.
Nowadays the trick to getting new patients this increasing revenue is by not only having a website but by boosting online presence in several other ways. For example, submitting the practice to online directories, creating a profile on the major review sites, plus setting up a social media profile on various social media apps is a sure way to increase revenue.
Improve Patient Collection Strategy
High-deductible plans keep rising, so healthcare organizations and providers who do not make debt collection a high priority will definitely not see an increase in revenue. Therefore, high deductible plans mean bigger medical bills; one’s patients aren’t always prepared to pay for them.
Patient co-payments form a non-negligible part of overall revenue so here are management tips to collect them and increase revenue:
- Use patient appointment reminders to prompt payment of outstanding bills
- Consider a billing management software system
- Enable online payment options
- Offer feasible payment plans
- Consider using a collections agency
- Be transparent and upfront about costs to enable patients to budget
- Contact “slow payers” more frequently and persistently
So, you can also help patients with tight budgets to manage their healthcare on an ongoing basis by referring them to resources like Health Status.
Optimize Appointment Scheduling
Maintaining patient flow without getting bottlenecks and long wait times, keeping appointment wait times down plus allowing same-day walk-ins are appointment management optimization practices that’ll certainly increase revenue.
Here’s how:
- Gather relevant patient information before their scheduled appointment
- Consider using secure messaging
- Make a policy for late arrivals and no shows and stick to it
- Consider implementing a mobile queue solution
- Make the reception area comfortable
- Use a survey to gauge bottlenecks
- Delegate documentation
Motivate Staff
Good healthcare staff is healthcare providers’ most valuable resource. Therefore, happier employers make for happier patients; happy patients equals more revenue.
Inspire staff by:
- Giving them positive feedback and encouragement as often as possible
- Give them an avenue to be heard in the goings-on of your practice
- Appoint them as heads of various projects
- Consider one-on-one meetings to check-in
Effectively managing a healthcare business in a way that yields profits is fast becoming more and more difficult. Healthcare providers can increase revenue by taking steps like renegotiating payor contracts, implementing payment collection strategies, optimizing scheduling, and motivating staff.