As your organization pivots to adapt to the ever-changing healthcare environment in the COVID-19 landscape, you may be more focused than ever on cost cutting.

In an earlier blog post “Squeeze the orange, not the turnip”, we addressed the positive cash flow improvements that a healthy revenue cycle could deliver, focusing on improving collection rates and making investments with a clear ROI, instead of squeezing additional costs out of departments already cut to the bone.

The way that leaders think about revenue cycle, starting with the reporting structure and ending with team dynamics can make or break your ability to collect all you are owed, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The mistake that many organizations make is to isolate the revenue cycle team, treating them as a stand-alone department instead of an integrated set of activities. Revenue cycle begins with the first time a patient calls to inquire about an appointment and ends when that patient makes a payment on their share of cost. This means that revenue cycle is a cooperative effort between the front office, providers, coders and billing staff and finance. Often, each of these teams reports to different leaders in the organization, which can lead to gaps in efficiency and competing priorities.

Because your revenue cycle cannot be siloed into a single team or isolated of activities, we like to refer to it as a Relational Revenue Cycle.

A healthy Relational Revenue Cycle has the following components:

Strong Systems – IT and system admin support and best practice policy and procedures

Clear and Accessible Data and Metrics – The adage “you can’t manage it if you don’t measure it” applies perfectly. If you have a solid set of executive dashboards, management KPIs and work-lists, you will have full visibility to revenue cycle performance, and, more importantly, the ability to pivot when you see a trend shift
Employee Training – Job aids and training tailored to help employees, in all areas of the organization, understand how their performance impacts the metrics and aligns to the organizational objectives
Collaboration – Recurring meetings and cross collaboration between managers, directors and C-level leaders to review performance metrics, create strategic plans for under-performing areas and execute jointly
Engaging Partners and Experts – Healthcare organizations should excel at providing high quality, low cost health care to their patients. Engaging specialist partners for coding, revenue cycle administration or strategy consultants can help you get to all of the work without the cost and administrative expense of keeping it in house.

A clean and productive revenue cycle is, literally, the fuel that keeps your organization running. It is a cross-functional team effort. Investing too little is like eating a diet exclusively made of junk-food; causing slow mind and body and higher long-term costs. Making healthy choices will generate returns that allow you to invest differently in your patient facing objectives.

If you would like to discuss this concept further, I welcome your call or email.

Revenue Cycle: More than a Department