Strong financial performance is essential for the success of healthcare organizations. To continue providing the best patient care while also improving financial performance, consider these four tactics:

Optimize your resources
Start by empowering staff to embrace their strongest skillsets and assets. While physicians and other clinicians focus on delivering high-quality patient care, administrative staff can help improve the practice’s bottom line and ensure ongoing operational needs are met. In addition, individual staff members can focus on enhancing patient engagement, and others on implementing billing and other operational best practices.

Next, eliminate cumbersome bolt-on technology wherever possible. Start by looking at your core solutions. Does your vendor offer integrations that help to simplify and better connect your tech stack? Can staff work efficiently within the workflows? Ensure that everything is working toward that goal and that you are not spending more time managing your technology than your revenue cycle. Do not be afraid to make a transition if necessary.

Acquire and retain patients
Both acquiring and retaining patients requires effective outreach. To acquire new patients, effective marketing is necessary. To retain patients, leverage a variety of communication modes. Consider patient behaviors. Some individuals prefer texts and emails, while others prefer phone calls and paper mail. The type of communication a patient prefers may change over time. Utilize technology that includes a variety of communication options to satisfy patient preferences.

Next, reduce no-shows and fill the schedule. No-shows are problematic, not only because of financial impact but also because 32% of patients who have one or more no-show appointments leave the practice altogether. Automating appointment reminders and ensuring appointments are rescheduled promptly will help keep patients connected to the practice. This will also allow you to keep your providers’ schedules full without overbooking, which can lead to burnout.

Improve productivity
Enable providers to focus on patient care. Administrative tasks should be delegated to non-clinical staff wherever possible to allow providers to keep their focus and avoid burnout.

Next, understand and apply performance data. Your technology partner should provide you with data on how your revenue cycle management performance is trending. Choose a vendor who not only makes performance data accessible and useable but is also a true partner, committed to continuous improvement over time.

Finally, where possible, free up other staff to focus on patient needs. Patient experience is paramount in today’s healthcare landscape, so wherever possible, offload back-office tasks so that when anyone on staff, clinical and non-clinical alike, has contact with patients, they can be fully present and focused on creating a positive experience.

Boost collection rates
The final piece of financial performance is to boost your collections, and the first way to do that is to proactively engage and negotiate with payers. Review your contracts and determine if you are being paid fairly. Where necessary, take time to reach out to payers to renegotiate the terms of your contract to be more favorable.

Collect effectively for every visit and be prepared with information regarding each patient’s account status at the time of their appointment. You must have a plan in place for how to collect. Consider creating a standardized down payment model in your organization, or perhaps offering pre-payment options for co-pays. Patients are more likely to pay the bill if they pay at the time of service. Simply asking patients how they would like to pay can help to create a situation in which patients have every opportunity to keep their accounts up to date.

Make each claim count – every claim should go out correctly the first time. Ensure the right people with the right skills are preparing your claims to avoid denials as much as possible. If a denial should still occur, make sure to address any errors and resubmit right away so as not to lose revenue.

Finally, make value-based care a priority. Make sure your technology is up to both government and private payer mandates and look for streamlined workflows that assist providers in capturing quality measures at the moment. Additionally, you must review data regularly to identify and close care gaps.

Financial success allows an organization to continue doing what it does best – provide outstanding patient care. To ensure financial performance is at its best, it is important to choose technology partners that can support your revenue cycle management goals.

About the authors: Crystal Stanton is a digital marketing specialist at Henry Schein MicroMD. She has seven years of experience in the health information technology industry. Andrea Zaczyk is a director of product marketing at athenahealth. With over twelve years of experience in Healthcare IT and revenue cycle management, her communications focus is on supporting best practice in healthcare billing.