Hospitals should concentrate on patient access and other front-end processes to improve revenue cycle performance, according to Ethan Hawke, regional director of billing and client relations at BillingParadise.
Mr. Hawke shared the following tip with Becker's Hospital Review.
"A robust patient access strategy is inevitable to thrive in the value-based care environment. To eliminate patient access hurdles hospitals must focus on automating pre-authorization, payer policy maintenance, benefits verification and securing authorization.
"Lack of centralization in pre-service activity, inconsistent processes, lack of knowledge in payer plans, manual patient data entry challenges in pre-authorization screening and verification are the root causes of claim denials. Nearly 49 percent of denials are due to front-end revenue cycle inefficiencies. Hospitals must automate their patient access processes to optimize their revenue cycle."
If you would like to share your RCM best practices, please email Kelly Gooch at kgooch@beckershealthcare.com to be featured in the "RCM tip of the day" series.
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