5 Ways to Optimize the Revenue of Your Medical Practice and Clinical Processes

Technologies that help optimize revenue and performance of your medical practice

There’s no denying that revenue is essential for any business. Sustained revenue flow keeps the employees paid, leaves the doors open, and the patrons happy. It is the same for medical practice as well. However, it can be challenging to optimize medical practice revenue and increase avenues to bring in more money. It is crucial to find strategies that the medical practice can maintain over time to ensure a steady cash inflow. 

Additionally, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to influence patient behaviors, it is pushing healthcare practices across the globe to re-evaluate their business operations and look for solutions that emphasize clinical efficiencies, improve patient revenue cycle management along with enhanced reporting and analytics tools.

Apart from the challenges related to the patient intake process during the pandemic, healthcare providers also have had to meet the sudden demand for virtual care by embracing digital healthcare technologies. Advanced technology in healthcare helps automate major processes, facilitate patient engagement efforts, and improve financial stability.

In this article, we share tips to optimize the revenue of your medical practice.

1. Robust financial management

Strong finance is the foundation of every business. You must consider what money is going out in the form of overhead costs, payroll, and miscellaneous expenses. Look for ways to cut unnecessary expenditures and save your practice some money.

There are chances that you are spending on something unnecessary at your practice or experiencing a small ROI due to a huge yet incompetent investment. If a service is not bringing you a good ROI, you should remove it. To overcome these issues, ensure you have a robust revenue cycle management system in place.

Custom RCM systems help improve the administrative and clinical functions associated with claims processing payments and revenue generation. The RCM system also facilitates the financial processes of identification, management, and collection between patients and providers. RCM helps you optimize your revenue cycle at all the points of the financial process. This enables you to collect and increase revenue whenever and wherever you should.

2. Leverage healthcare information technology

While the initial cost and ongoing investment may vary based on your practice, most of the following technological investments will help you save money and increase your revenue over time.

Read more: 7 Major Impacts of Technology in Healthcare

Example 1: Telehealth

Technologies like telehealth offer safer alternatives to in-person visits. With the ongoing pandemic, this technology helps provide safe care by connecting via virtual video visits. If your practice can allot for more appointments, then telehealth allows for more visits throughout your day.

Additionally, patient portals, self-check kiosks, and QR codes help reduce the risks of exposure and increase scheduling flexibility and clinical availability. Remote patient monitoring (RPM) helps bring about organizational resilience and stabilizes patient outcomes with better and safer alternatives to in-person visits.

Example 2: Appointment Management Systems

Most medical practices lose revenue due to no-shows, missed appointments, or late cancellations. Appointment management systems ensure that patients are notified well ahead of their appointment times. This will eventually provide your practice with a better chance of fulfilling appointment times and retaining revenue. It will also improve patient trust and credibility and allow your medical staff to stay organized at work. 

Example 3: Practice Management System

This system includes all your appointment scheduling, billing, patient registration, claims processing, clearinghouse integration, and more. So, investing in an intelligent practice management system can bring billing in-house and retain previously claimed revenue from outsourcing.

Read more: Digital Tools For The Future Of Healthcare Providers

3. Intuitive reporting and automation

An Electronic Health Record(EHR) system includes an array of innovative tools that can significantly impact your practice’s productivity and profitability. The EHR technology should also have tools that offer flexible functionality and interactive engagement in addition to simple record keeping so that you can focus more on patient care and waste less time on troubleshooting staff errors or reconfiguring documentation notes.

Additionally, automated workflows, comprehensive reporting features, and insightful productivity metrics help simplify your practice’s workload and streamline task management. Picklists allow you to create templates, line-item defaults and define column choices so that information is readily available and easily accessible.

4. Optimize your medical billing

To maximize your medical practice’s revenue, you must include efficient and personalized medical billing software.  It allows you to optimize the bills according to the prevalent industry standards. Most practices bill patients at allowable lower levels to avoid being audited. While you may not get audited, the practice leaves behind a lot of money. So, when you provide clinical service, make sure to document it properly and bill customers appropriately. Medical billing software makes auditing easy and relieves your admins from revenue management challenges. The software also ensures that your billing and coding staff are not making mistakes, leading to significant claims denial.

If claims denials, coding errors, or any other billing issues keep your practice from optimizing the income, you may consider building customized software to handle your organization’s specific challenges. Fingent specializes in developing customized medical billing software and healthcare application platforms by working closely with your medical practice. It allows you to lower denial rates, reduce errors, and streamline your revenue cycle.

5. Security and compliance

When it comes to healthcare, efficiency matters not just at the surface level but in every single aspect of treatment, including financing, scheduling, and reporting. To ensure your EHR can keep up with the regular system, it should include an educational database that allows providers to quickly train their staff and give the patient access to explanatory articles and videos. Keeping these resources available will help bring about positive outcomes and hassle-free software maintenance. Fingent offers custom software development, testing, implementation, maintenance, and support services for healthcare service providers. We’ve partnered with organizations like NHS to help them improve clinical process management using technology. 

While compliance laws ensure patient health information (PHI) and overall safety of practice operations, you must make cybersecurity a top priority. This is especially true now with the shift to working remotely. Employees are more prone to hacker’s attempts to cease connectivity and steal confidential data. To overcome this, you must use virtual private networks (VPN) and reliable firewall software to safeguard vital business information. Our network security and IT infrastructure management services ensure that your business-critical assets are protected from cyber threats, and your proprietary information is protected 24/7. 

Read more: The Application and Impact of Information Technology in Healthcare

Advanced technology in healthcare has helped providers choose and select a system that benefits their business. For example, medical billing software, revenue cycle management, appointment management, and patient engagement systems are a few solutions that providers should consider when employing an EHR solution. Healthcare technology improves patient resolutions, avoids preventable errors, and expands clinical availability. 

Practice is a step ahead of theory. Our healthcare IT system developers follow this rule of thumb. Connect with our team to learn more about the technologies you can adopt to gain business benefits and significant cost savings.