Competition can be healthy. Whether you’re rooting for your favorite football team or facing a friend in a summer softball league, the goal is winning. And having fun, of course.
Where you don’t want stiff competition from is other physician practices in your area. You want to be patients’ first choice for care and build loyalty with them. The quality of care you provide plays a big part in that, but so do other factors.
Read More: 4 Ways to Boost the Patient Experience of Your Medical Practice
For example, many patients today prefer a healthcare provider whose practice offers digital health tools. It’s the primary push behind healthcare consumerism, in which patients take more of an active role in their health.
Take text messaging. Most patients want to hear from their provider via text instead of a phone call. That’s a big reason practices that utilize this technology have fewer no-shows and cancellations.
These days, there’s much more to billing and revenue cycle management software than meets the eye, and without a platform developed with the very latest automation, you might not realize just how much money you’re leaving on the table.
Check out our three major warning signs that your billing system is giving your competition a leg up.
- You’re Equipped with Interfaces — But Not Integrations
As we mentioned in a previous blog, integration and interface often get used interchangeably because both processes allow for data to get passed from one place to another. However, although interfaces act as a bridge that allows multiple systems and applications to share data, integration enables data to automatically, securely and dynamically flow from one source to another by connecting disparate systems.
Sure, interfaces can connect disparate systems, but users still have to operate in informational silos and overlapping databases. The problem? This often causes inefficiencies and data quality issues.
Another drawback to interfaces without integrations is the lack of a real-time view of your practice’s overall performance. Trying to piece together key metrics bit by bit doesn’t provide the clarity necessary to gauge how you’re doing operationally and financially. Without those metrics, you probably do not have a clear idea of what you need to do to keep up with those competitors.
- Your Practice Has Grown — But Your Software Hasn’t Kept Pace
Business growth is great. But it’s not good if the technology your practice uses doesn’t grow with you.
The best IT solutions are scalable — without losing any functionality in the process. It doesn’t matter if you have two, three or 10 facilities.
Read More: Articulating Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare
A hosted solution is not only scalable and secure, but also helps healthcare organizations cut costs by mitigating the need to invest in IT equipment and storage space. This can reduce downtime and after-hours calls to manage system issues, while lessening the time and costs in connection with routine system updates and security patches. Even small practices can employ hosted billing and revenue cycle management (RCM) technologies without potentially costly ongoing maintenance. That’s a cost savings that can be applied to other core business goals.
Learn More in our Case Study, “Scalability, Reporting, and Patient Payment Portals for Radiology Billing”
- You Spend Way Too Much Time Digging Through Mounds of Data
The healthcare industry generates 19 terabytes of data annually. That’s approximately 30% of all data across the world. A majority of this data is due to widespread use of mobile technology.
Through analytics, data gives you actionable insight to improve quality of care, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), reduce operational costs, predict future trends and increase patient safety. If you don’t utilize the right technology, though, you must manually dig through all that information.
There are two big problems with sifting and sorting through data manually. The first is a lack of accuracy, which often leads to costly billing errors and denials. The other issue with manual data retrieval is that it takes a lot of time, and once you discover an issue, you may already be behind in correcting it. Plus, that’s time wasted that your practice could otherwise spend on other tasks — especially patient care and follow-up.
Implementing automated RCM systems can be crucial for improving the efficiency of the revenue cycle process – and keeping up with your competitors. The automation provided by ImagineOne™ aids in improving accuracy and optimizing compliance while speeding up traditionally slow manual tasks. Contact us today to find out more!