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It’s no surprise to us that administrative workloads and wrangling revenue cycle management top their list of pain points – after all, that’s why we’re here! Let’s take a look at the Top Five RCM Hassles as reported to us by those of you on the front lines in the back office and ‘upstairs.’
1. Denials, Denials, Denials
You can’t deny it (sorry, we couldn’t help that). Denials are the perfect trap. A Change Healthcare study found 63% of claims were recoverable but cost more than $100 each to pursue an appeal. We don’t think that even fully represents the time your staff can spend trying to figure out what went wrong and crafting an appeal. What’s worse, that same study also found 86% of denials may be avoidable altogether.
2. Good Help Is Hard To Find (And Keep)
RCM requires specialized knowledge and an eye for detail. Staff with this skill set do not grow on trees. This situation has been made all the more challenging thanks to a pandemic-impacted labor market. More often than not, practices find themselves having to train new hires and that takes time. So much time. For example, consider explanations of benefits (EOBs) and electronic remittance advice (ERAs). They arrive in as many different formats as there are payers – and your staff needs to become fluent in all of them.
3. Technology Is Supposed To Make Things Easier, Isn’t It?
From practice management software to automated insurance billing solutions (ahem), there is a surfeit of choices with which to equip your practices. Research, purchasing, implementation and finally, training your staff on these new tools takes - one more time, with feeling - time.
4. More Time, More Money …
… More problems, to paraphrase the old song. We’ve previously mentioned the CAQH 2021 Index Data that estimated dental practices seeing 750 patients per month may be losing up to 40 hours in that month to manual and partially manual tasks related to billing. But we didn’t need someone else’s study to tell us that.
5. Getting Everybody On The Same Page
Growth is great but it would be even better if all of the offices joining your group came with the same RCM systems, processes, and staff. A patchwork of inherited systems is not only inefficient, it makes it hard for management to get an accurate read on performance. Waiting on payments and processing paper checks across multiple locations throws an additional wrench in cash flow.
In Conclusion
There’s a theme here and it’s that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Practices are constantly trying to meet the challenge of providing exceptional patient care while balancing billing-related work that multiplies with growth.
This is the part where we tell you that we’ve got you covered. We invite you to learn more about Remit AI - our automated answer to these problems, or attend our Dental RCM Bootcamp to learn the hacks, tips, and tricks to get your RCM systems under control.
