5 Ways Analytics in the Business Office Can Improve Your Revenue

Uncompensated care is on the rise. Providers are projected to write off as much as $200 billion by 2019. Value-based reimbursement, ICD-10, bundled payments, and shared accountability payment models are all creating a new healthcare economy.

In this new economy, it’s important to ensure you are paid for the care you deliver. With data analytics in the business office, you can increase collections, reduce denials, and guide business strategy.

Here are the top five ways analytics can help you take control of your revenue.

#1: Prioritize accounts and increase cash

Analytics help you gain big-picture insight into your financial health as well as manage the day-to-day efforts of the business office. You can prioritize accounts and accelerate collections with daily insight into denials, team efficiency, and patient obligation risk. Analytics show the average number of days in accounts receivable (AR), accounts in AR for more than 90 days, coding delays, the root causes of denials, and more—all aimed at increasing collections.

#2: Reduce denials by identifying root causes

Detailed analysis can help you identify exactly why denials are happening and where missteps may be taking place. With insight into denials, you can understand the causes of disputed claims, identify denial trends by payer, and analyze appeal success. Plus, you can identify at-risk dollars and address denials—before they happen—through predictive analytics.

#3: Streamline business office operations

Business office operational tools complement analytics to improve efficiency and productivity. These tools enable your teams to manage and have insight into billing and coding delays, overall time to bill and time to pay, account liquidation timeframes, and avoidable denials caused by missing information or authorization issues.

#4: Improve self-pay collections

Collecting on self-pay accounts can be a challenge for the business office. It’s important to collect, but only in an efficient, cost-effective way. Predictive analytics can minimize time wasted on high-risk accounts, and help you focus on high-value accounts with the greatest likelihood of payment. You can ultimately reduce the cost to collect, streamline financial counseling workflow, and identify patients eligible for Medicaid or charity care.

#5: Analyze the entire revenue lifecycle

With analytics in the business office, mid-cycle, and patient access, you can use your data to improve all points of the revenue cycle. You can identify lost revenue, missed revenue, and revenue at risk—whether it’s due to insufficient documentation, missing charges, denials, bad debt, take-backs, or a lack of insight into the process. You can track all of these “leakage points” in the revenue cycle through a single, integrated data analytics platform.

Learn more about how business office analytics can help you take control of your revenue.