How efficient Healthcare Accounts Receivable Services ensure financial health of medical practitioners

Are you facing cash flow shortages due to increasing accounts receivable days? You are not alone in this. As per industry experts, more than 41% of US medical practitioners face this issue. The reason behind this would be the high rate of claim delays and rejections due to billing ineffectiveness.  

This is why hiring expert help from healthcare accounts receivable service providers becomes  

Necessary  for practitioners. These experts have an in-depth understanding of accounts receivable management, which allows them to ensure the financial stability of practitioners.  

What Are Healthcare Accounts Receivable Services?  

Healthcare accounts receivable (AR) refer to the outstanding balance that medical providers are yet to receive from the insurance payer for their services rendered. It is a crucial component of revenue cycle management of healthcare practitioners.  

Key aspects include:  

• It can be of two types. The first is insurance payers, meaning the earnings not yet received from payers’ end like Medicare. The next is patient AR, which refers to the payments owed by patients and includes co-pays and deductibles. 
   
• The accounts receivable cycle starts after the claim submission for services rendered are submitted. 
   
• Unpaid claims are categorized as accounts receivables which are then divided into aging buckets. For example, these buckets are categorized based on days like 30, 60, 90+ days.  

Ensuring such uncollected revenue is tackled effectively is fundamental to establishing a steady cash flow for practitioners. This is where expert healthcare accounts receivable services come into play. These experts ensure constant follow-ups to identify the reason behind delays and adopt a proactive approach to resolve the identified issue. This further ensures fair reimbursement for practitioners.  

Common Accounts Receivable Challenges Faced by Medical Practitioners  

Healthcare accounts receivable management is considered quite a daunting topic among practitioners as it directly impacts their cash flow. This is why understanding  

common bottlenecks is necessary. Firstly, high denial rates due to claim inaccuracies are one of the biggest reasons for high accounts receivable days. Even the smallest errors in abiding by payer specific guidelines like coding inaccuracies, gaps in clinical documentation, prior authorization failure, all can lead to claim hold ups, further hindering practitioners’ revenue collection.  

Furthermore, oftentimes, there are chances of slow reimbursement among payers because they deal with a significant number of claims each day. This is why ensuring constant follow-ups with the payers is necessary for billers, which further increases their administrative workload.  

Additionally, patients’ responsibility is gradually raising with high-deductible health plans. As per industry experts, individual deductible under some plans is now starting around $1,700 with family plans reaching $3,400 or more. This can be overwhelming for practitioners, as they now also must follow up with patients for timely payments.  

Thus, hiring a medical accounts receivable company is necessary for practitioners to tackle these complexities.  

Best Practices for Effective Accounts Receivable Management  

Some of the most frequent approaches to ensure effective medical accounts receivable 

management include:  

1. Reviewing the several AR metrics like AR days, AR aging reports, first pass resolution rate to identify patterns. For example, analyzing AR days allows practitioners to see how much time on average they require to collect payments.
    
2. Providing staff training to ensure clean claim submission. Simply put, this will allow practitioners to ensure all payer specific billing requirements are met, like assigning correct medical codes for services rendered.
    
3. Using advanced technology to automate follow-up schedules or to set reminders to ensure the claims are processed effectively.
    
4. Hiring effective healthcare accounts receivable services to get certified experts managing end-to-end revenue cycle management for practitioners including outstanding payments.  

How Healthcare Accounts Receivable Services Ensure Financial Health  

Expert service providers essentially perform constant follow-ups with insurance payers to ensure claims are processed effectively. Not only that, if there is any delay or denial, then they conduct a thorough review to find out the issue and implement prompt solutions to solve it as soon as possible. This decreases any payment delays. 

Furthermore, these companies usually provide comprehensive revenue cycle management services, meaning they ensure proper claim submission and high first-pass claim collection rate through their expertise and knowledge on billing nuances.  

Streamline Accounts Receivable Management with the Right partner  

Healthcare accounts receivable outsourcing is the best solution when it comes to hiring the right help. This is because these companies are not only cost effective but have expertise and in-depth grasp over such specialized requirements. For example, RCM solution providers like SunKnowledge charge as low as $7 per hour or only 2% of entire receivable amount for their services. Secondly, these companies ensure a high first pass claim collection rate which often goes up to 97%. This is essential for reducing accounts receivable days. Additionally, these companies claim to ensure 30% outstanding payment retrieval within the first month, which suggests their great expertise over the domain.  

Lastly, companies like SunKnowledge ensure high productivity rate with their extensive resources; for example, they make around 70-80 contacts daily for payment collections over the phone depending on need. All these indicate why outsourcing such administrative tasks is more lucrative.  
 

If you are also struggling to ensure steady cash flow due to increasing outstanding payments, then consider healthcare accounts receivable outsourcing.