The 8th Costly Sin of RCM

Previously, we’ve discussed the Seven Costly Sins made in Billing and Revenue Cycle Management (Read Original Article Here)

These include:

  1. Inaccurate Provider Enrollment
  2. Ineffectual Coding and Tracking Practices
  3. Untimely Claims
  4. Lack of Payor Validation & Reimbursement Tracking
  5. Slow Inquiry Response
  6. Passive Denial Management
  7. Incomplete or Nonexistent Auditing & Validation

While each of these represents the “components” of the billing process where losses occur, the greatest risk of financial loss, is inaction as a result of indecisiveness.

In my thirty-plus years of practice management and medical billing, I’ve seen more money lost by physician groups not taking action or not taking action quickly enough than any other single factor.

When most of the facts are easily recognizable in a decision, your physician trained mind executes in a split second.  Uncertainty can disable that normal decisive tendency.  When the issue at hand happens to be your revenue and slippage is occurring in some or all of the seven areas listed above, the dollars lost can accumulate into tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars very quickly.

Choosing to wait, to defer, to depend on a future event, or to postpone for another’s decision is indeed costly.

Choose to make a decision based on the best information available and have confidence in yourself.  The greatest risk isn’t usually in not making the best decision, but no decision at all.

Be decisive.  Change your billing process.  Chances are, if you’re reading this, you already have enough internal angst to recognize that things really do need to change.

Let us help by performing a revenue analysis for you; simply email your request to Sara Nofziger-Drew at sara@healthpromedical.com or call 419-223-2785. It will either provide you peace of mind that your current process is okay or more likely confirm what you already suspect that you are leaving money on the table and need to make a change.

Article Author, Don Rodden, CHBME, CPA (Inactive)

Don Rodden is a principal at HealthPro Medical Billing. He has more than 30 years of experience in the Revenue Cycle Management industry and served as the president of the Healthcare Business Management Association (HBMA) in 2012. He is also a member of the HBMA Government Relations Committee.