The first steps toward easing your administrative burden and improving your operating margin are workflow prioritization, resolution automation, and structured contact.
Administrative costs are overwhelming U.S. healthcare providers and chipping away at your operating margin. Why? Because you and your staff spend so much time dealing with revenue cycle operations.
Just how much of a burden are things like payer contracting, credentialing, patient registration, charge capture, coding, bill submission, denials management, and cash posting? Consider this:
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Physicians spend an average of 3.4 hours per week interacting with insurance payers (Based on data collected by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA))
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This averages $82,975 in salary spend or eight 25-minute patient interactions at $109.44 each (Based on code 99214, the most commonly billed procedure to the Centers of Medicare & Medicaid Services)
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The eight unseen patients represent a missed opportunity of $875 per week or $45,527 per year.
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Add this missed revenue to $82,975 in salary spend and you can see the bottom line.
The average cost for one physician to interact with insurance payers is $128,502 annually.
Meanwhile, your clerical staff spends an average of 53.1 hours on revenue cycle interactions every week—per physician. While new administrative solutions and technologies are being developed, fragmented workflows still make it difficult to prioritize the best return on investment for your practice’s time. Solutions exist for authorizations, billing, denials management, payment variances, and more, but these are often siloed, making it hard to truly prioritize.
Compound fragmented workflows with the reality that payers all have different preferred methods of contact—phone, email, fax, certified mail, payer portals—and your clerical staff can easily be overwhelmed. The first steps toward improving your operating margin (and easing the burden of revenue cycle operations on you and your staff) are workflow prioritization, resolution automation, and structured contact.
To learn how Rivet can help ease the burden of administrative costs on your practice, request a demo today.
