According to The Market Reports, the revenue cycle outsourcing market will reach $23 billion by 2022, growing at a CAGR of 11.9% between 2017 and 2023. We anticipate that the growth rate of RCM outsourcing will continue to sustain at the same level as healthcare providers are reeling under the worst economic and labor crisis of the century.
When you look at the mission statements of healthcare institutions, the common thread is to provide high-quality medical care to patients. While the goal seems straightforward, healthcare institutions must achieve financial efficiencies to find the cash for technology investments and process improvements to achieve the objective of patient care. Many CFOs believe that RCM outsourcing is a crucial strategy to save costs. In reality, the value an outsourcing strategy offers goes way beyond costs.
Most healthcare institutions have sub-optimal in-house revenue cycle processes and leave money on the table due to inadequacies in medical coding and clinical documentation, ineffective information capture at the front-end, and lack of rigor in denial management processes. This difference between the status quo and optimal revenue cycle processes can mean financial success or failure for healthcare institutions.
Healthcare providers are battling multiple headwinds, including a shortage of RCM and clinical staff, a lack of investments to create patient-centric processes as healthcare consumerism rises, and constantly declining reimbursement rates. Most hospital CFOs recognize that they need investments to improve workflows, get analytical insights, and hire additional resources.
By outsourcing RCM processes, healthcare CFOs can unlock cash through cost savings and improved reimbursements. The improved effectiveness enables them to find the money to invest in technology and methods to deliver better patient care.
Benefits of Outsourcing - Summary
This document outlines some of the key benefits of outsourcing your revenue cycle, including:
Choose between outsourcing and offshoring to gain significant cost savings.
Improved Collections and Timely reimbursements
Arresting Revenue Leakage through diligent coding and focusing on reducing discharges not fully billed
Creating a Sustainably Effective Revenue Cycle through iterative process improvement initiatives
Improved Process Rigor: Achieve excellence in revenue cycle services delivery through automated workflows to improve the speed and quality of processing
Staying in Control - Get access to workflow and other collaboration technologies to manage the offshore operations by the numbers.
On-demand availability of qualified labor. Say goodbye to the long waiting to hire, train, and deploy new employees. Scale up your operations with your outsourcing partner, assuring you of access to a qualified labor pool.
Delivery Assurance – Quality, Responsiveness, and Security. Get the assurance of best-in-class delivery environments
Future Proof Your Operations: Investing in and maintaining new generation technologies is costly and requires qualified labor to run them. Why not utilize your partner’s automation technologies to future-proof your operations. You get access to the tech without the headache of managing it.
Conclusion
Outsourcing your revenue cycle helps you optimize collections while reducing your total operations costs. While improved effectiveness accelerates cash flow, diligent coding can help you arrest revenue leakage. Technology and automation can further reduce outsourcing costs by enabling you to do more with less. Outsourcing should not mean that you let go of control and move to a more complex environment; instead, it should ease the burden on your staff and help you focus on higher-value activities.