Ten Ways to Use Your Data to Manage Revenue

There’s no doubt that today’s healthcare financial landscape is complex. Fee-for-value reimbursements, bundled payments and high-deductible plans are changing the healthcare revenue lifecycle.

But there’s great power in your data. By harnessing your data, you can take control of changing reimbursement models and other legislative reform that poses a potential threat to your financial viability.

Here are ten ways you can use your data to effectively manage revenue across the healthcare enterprise:

1. Increase point-of-service collections. With data analytics and an integrated workflow, you can verify eligibility, confirm demographics and fully understand patient responsibilities after insurance, so registrars can confidently collect payment prior to service.
2. Understand denial root causes. Denials come from all areas of the revenue lifecycle. By linking denial trends to their origins, you can resolve errors and oversights that lead to payer rejections and denial write-offs.
3. Improve coding and documentation for ICD-10 and beyond. Make sure you get paid for the services you provide. Generating claims that accurately reflect the acuity of services is the first step in ensuring financial viability. Benchmarking data identifies documentation variances and pinpoints potential missed revenue.
4. Educate physicians and coders. Rather than tackling all 150,000+ ICD-10 codes, use your data to identify which physicians and coders will be most affected by which codes. Then prioritize coding and documentation specificity for only those areas, departments and specialties.
5. Monitor audit risk and reduce take-backs. Improving your financial health isn’t about finding maximum revenue. It’s about finding accurate revenue. By proactively identifying compliance risk areas in your data, you can avoid revenue take-backs and track the audit appeal process.
6. Reduce the cost to collect. With the Affordable Care Act, fewer uninsured patients are entering the doors of the hospital, but their copays and deductibles can be high. By using your data to identify each patient’s propensity and ability to pay, you can improve collections and reduce the cost to collect.
7. Accelerate back-end cash collections. With daily snapshots of revenue data and metrics on AR days, denials and DNFB coding delays, you can expose AR bottlenecks and optimize collections workflow.
8. Compare your financial performance to your peers. Powerful benchmarking data enables you to compare aspects of your revenue against current data from today’s peers so you can identify your organization’s weaknesses and quickly spot improvement opportunities.
9. Embrace new reimbursement models with a single source of truth. As clinical performance becomes a dominant driver in fee-for-value reimbursement, your data can help your clinical and financial leadership come together to align strategies and objectives.
10. Create a culture of action and accountability. Once your revenue initiatives are identified, create action plans and assign points of accountability to ensure your goals come to fruition.

For more information, contact us at info@medeanalytics.com.