As your healthcare organization closes out the calendar year and considers opportunities for growth in 2025, it will be critical to examine the strength of your revenue cycle management strategy. The past few years have squeezed providers in numerous ways, with margin pressures, decreased reimbursements, increased costs, and workforce shortages bringing an array of operational challenges. These market pressures have significantly hindered revenue cycle performance, particularly for community, rural, and critical access providers.
In an ideal environment, healthcare leaders should be thinking about thriving, not merely staying afloat. That’s where outsourcing with a strategic RCM partnership comes in — one where you can leverage a flexible workforce, proven processes, and data-driven insights to optimize and improve your revenue cycle performance. Outsourcing some or all of your RCM strategy can accelerate overall performance in the coming year in the following five ways:
1. Mitigate staffing concerns
Did you know that approximately 6.5 million healthcare professionals will permanently leave the profession by 2026? In revenue cycle management specifically, healthcare finance leaders report significant workforce shortages, with 25% needing to hire more than 20 employees to fully staff their departments.
By outsourcing to revenue cycle experts, your internal staff can focus more time and energy on the most pressing tasks related to patient care, and potentially new opportunities to streamline efficiencies and execute growth plans. For example, Currance provides both flexible and scalable outsourcing solutions, so each client can determine how to best develop and enhance their teams. With proven workforce experience in this partnership, clients will be able to grow experience across existing teams, gain valuable insights, enhance organization best practices to increase retention, and achieve measurable progress in productivity and quality of output.
2. Identify opportunities to collect more revenue
Many small to midsized health systems, providers, and independent hospitals are failing to identify RCM as a strategic opportunity to collect significantly more revenue. Often, decision-makers feel resigned to take drastic measures, such as fundamentally changing their businesses in response to margin pressures for survival. Whether they make moves toward mergers or acquisitions or add new service lines, these strategies bring new complexities and risks for which organizations are typically not prepared.
Instead, outsourcing some or all of your revenue cycle management strategy allows you to maximize cash based on work you’re already doing. Don’t you want to realize every dollar of earned revenue that is not being collected? Proven solutions and seasoned expertise will guide providers using a tailored combination of technology, support, and intelligence to streamline existing operations and improve the healthcare experience.
3. Improve revenue cycle processes for lasting results
At Currance, one of our key values is that we must constantly improve, adopting new ways of doing things and advancing our services to help our team and our clients. Rapid changes in the healthcare environment require this same level of agility. As a partner, we want the same adaptability for our clients, which begins with examining their organizations for ways to improve overall revenue cycle process quality and throughput. Your employees and your patients deserve nothing less.
By embracing strategic partnership, you will be able to consider shortfalls of your existing revenue cycle processes and identify how you can streamline and automate tasks to better prioritize work and align functions. Using a systems and process management focus as the foundation, you can achieve ongoing performance improvement and collaborate more effectively for lasting results. A strategic partner will share the tools that support an improvement mindset — and plan — to realize significant gains organization-wide.
4. Adopt technologies that work for your organization
The complexities of new technologies can often be a barrier to adoption, especially considering the fact that today’s healthcare workforce spans four generations. To take advantage of the latest capabilities, providers need champions in their corner; those who can provide the right technical insights and communication to drive process improvements. Organization-wide technology adoption is a daunting project, to put it mildly. Outsourcing can help.
Currance’s experts have built our unique offering on prioritized workflows, process analytics, and integrated technology to support and guide you as we drive performance together. Our technology — and its applications— actually solves pressing problems, enhances visibility of operations, eliminates non-value-added work, and encourages team engagement across the entire revenue cycle. Applications that enable yield workflows, automation, analytics, and root cause insights back the decisions that most affect your performance, particularly in prioritizing A/R and more effectively interacting with payers. Technology is your friend, and outsourcing to a strategic partner will help you maximize the yields of that friendship.
5. Gain a deep understanding of your revenue cycle and business
When we start our engagement with clients, we often see that there’s a lack of visibility about revenue cycle weaknesses, particularly denials. Payer behaviors are generally misunderstood. It’s impossible to accelerate cash collections without first taking a “big picture look” at your current RCM strategy and identifying root cause insights about both processes and results. Collection efforts that fail must be resolved to leverage new opportunities for success. Often, it takes an honest, outside assessment to see this.
Strategic RCM partnerships begin with a trusted relationship that welcomes examination of process-level issues and identification of ways to overcome them. Our experts understand payer behaviors, trends, and patterns associated with maximum yield. We also use proven expertise in A/R to execute tactical strategies that accelerate performance, leveraging technology, support, and intelligence. Leveraging performance benchmarking, we compare your performance to other clients to provide actionable insights and next steps on securing new opportunities. As your understanding of your revenue cycle grows through outsourcing, the insights, analytics, and root cause corrective actions gain even more value for stronger and faster decision-making internally.
Outsourcing the revenue cycle to a strategic partner not only enables these five vital functions, but also provides a roadmap to success that will truly transform the revenue cycle from cost center to value driver. With engagement, flexibility, and an improvement mindset, a partnership with Currance delivers more than cash yield improvement. It delivers a better, stronger, more efficient revenue cycle that will allow you to handle the array of challenges that are ahead.
Currance transforms revenue cycle management differently, delivering sustainable success for our clients. Let’s schedule a meeting to talk about your revenue cycle challenges, understand how Currance can help, and how we can improve healthcare together.