All our latest thinking on medical billing, medical coding, accounts receivable and denial management processes, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and more..
The US healthcare industry utilizes Prior Authorization as a means of ensuring optimal and cost-effective use of medical services in accordance with the insurance coverage of each patient. As a rule, healthcare providers must reach out to and obtain approval from the respective insurance companies before they can deliver certain medical treatments or services to their patients.
A typical healthcare provider in the United States is reliant on payors, such as insurance companies, to pay the medical bills of the patients who seek their care. Based on the services they deliver, they make their claims to the payor in prescribed format, requesting reimbursement in accordance with the coverage linked to the patient.
Clinical documentation improvement sounds like a silver bullet for effective revenue cycle management - an easy and straightforward solution for all RCM woes of healthcare providers - but it demands executive willpower, systemic transformation (in many cases) and most importantly, the cooperation of physicians, nurses, coders, and other healthcare personnel.
As we set out to write the trends for 2023, we see that operational efficiency is now the central theme for hospital and healthcare systems leaders. The trends we covered in our 2022 paper continue to get stronger. These included the dawn of the digital health era, the rise of telehealth, the shift to work-from-home models, surprise billing regulations, AI-enabled processing, rogue nation-states leading to increasing cybersecurity risks, and patients now responsible for a rising portion of payments. 2023 is likely to be a very different and fast-paced year and mark a definitive shift in how healthcare is delivered and paid.
