Ophthalmology and Optometry Coding Alert

Boost your collections rate with these best practices.

Are your practice’s billing costs on the rise? If so, you’re not alone, but you may be able to help mitigate that by taking proactive approaches that help you collect your revenue sooner.

That was just one piece of advice presented by Scott Hudson, partner development manager with Eye Care Leaders, during the firm’s March 26 webinar, “Improving Your Practice’s Revenue Cycle Management.”

Hudson shared several eye-opening tips that can allow your practice to keep the cash flowing in the door while also ensuring that your operations are running as efficiently as possible.

1. Improving A/R Could Allow More Patient-Facing Time

If your practitioners have ever lamented their inability to see more patients in a day, keep in mind that one way to free up patient-facing time is to improve your accounts receivable (A/R). “Most practices would prefer to dedicate more time to patients, but physicians face mounting demand on their time in the form of increasing administrative requirements for healthcare delivery,” Hudson said.

Handling administrative issues is not only time-consuming, it’s costly. “Administrative costs are 30 percent of expenses in healthcare,” Hudson said. In fact, he noted, administrative costs continue to rise, and billing-related costs rose 21 percent from 2009 to 2012.

2. Optimizing Technology Could Save Money

One way to maximize your revenue cycle management is to optimize your use of technology, Hudson said. “About 75 percent of all healthcare communication is done by faxing, with an estimated 15 billion faxes sent per year,” he said. “Administrative inefficiency takes time away from patients, and can create bad debt and lost revenue.”

A recent Eye Care Leaders survey showed that 22 percent of physicians’ offices polled had 10 percent or more of all accounts go into bad debt, Hudson said. “Every single practice we surveyed had upwards of three percent of A/R go into bad debt. But you can find improvements through revenue cycle management (RCM).”

To ensure that you use technology efficiently and provide patients with the conveniences that will lead to easier payments, consider these options:

Offer online payments. “These are an expected option,” Hudson says. “Patients prefer to pay online. It’s instant, and checks take more time and effort.”

Eliminate manual entry of financial information. “This can take time and cause errors,” Hudson says. “You should eliminate this problem with solutions that allow card transactions and receipts be auto posted to your practice management solution right after the initial card swipe.”

Digitize receipts. Many patients do not want hard copies of receipts, Hudson says. “This time effort can be used elsewhere. Paper receipts are becoming less useful and that can create inefficiency. They require printing, signing, stapling, and filing, which can waste resources and time. Instead, today’s practices should keep up with the evolving client expectation of e-receipts.”

Go paperless. Digitize as many forms as possible, Hudson says. “It simplifies time for staff by cutting down on filing. Paper forms take a lot of time to complete and file and protect.”

3. Head off Issues at the Front Desk

To ensure that you are finding every possible income opportunity, “look at the back-end cycle and see how it affects the front end,” Hudson said. “Calls about payments are often coming through the front desk and monopolizing the phone.”

To better free up that time, you should use the scheduling and pre-registration period to tell patients ahead of time how much they’ll owe at their next visit so they’re ready to pay when they come to your office. When you schedule a patient, “it’s crucial to maximize the attendance rate,” Hudson says. “You don’t want patients not showing up, so remind patients of their appointments using text, email, or the phone, based on the patient’s personal preferences.”

When you have the patient in front of you, make sure you collect any balances. “Any practices that simply let a patient leave and send the bill later could face collection issues,” he says. “This is the best chance of discussing payment. If patients leave, the process of collecting revenue is infinitely more complicated.”

Studies have shown that customers will pay more of their bill up front at the time of service if given an estimate ahead of time, Hudson says. “In addition, most patients are comfortable with putting a card on file, which can reduce collection costs later.”

The point of implementing these steps is to eliminate write offs and improve your A/R, so even if it’s taxing to put them into motion at the beginning, it should pay off later.