Spending on end-to-end revenue cycle optimization is up 17 percent on average in the post-pandemic period, and the trend is expected to continue through 2028, according to a survey by Black Book Research.
Black Book surveyed hospital and health system CFOs, vice presidents of finance and RCM, and other financial leaders between the fourth quarter of 2022 and second quarter of 2023, according to a June 8 company news release. A total of 1,302 hospital financial team members independently participated in the crowd-sourced survey process.
Sixty-nine percent of hospital and health system senior financial managers surveyed said their organization prefers end-to-end revenue cycle solutions that "seamlessly integrate existing infrastructures to provide a standardized enterprise approach to the latest challenges of rising costs, consumerism and patient satisfaction, and the complexities of on-going consolidations of provider systems," according to the release.
Survey participants that implemented end-to-end software platforms since 2020 reported a 27 percent reduction in the cost to collect and net patient revenue increases averaging 6 percent.
Participants who chose full outsourced RCM where the vendor accepts accountability for the client's financial outcomes reported a 24 percent reduction in the cost to collect and net patient revenue increasing by 4 percent, according to the release.
"Across healthcare, we mainly have organizational RCM systems being constructed out of multiple subsystems," Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book, said in the release. "These subsystems are ideally a set of discrete connected, distributed platforms that are securely sharing information in real-time, but according to 82 percent of survey participants, a new vision of a connected RCM system will consist of an end-to-end software vendor or outsourcer that leads the client organization into the next decade seamlessly."