One of the hottest topics we hear talked about at Healthcare IT Today has to do with revenue cycle management (RCM). COVID and other financial pressures have driven RCM to the top of many healthcare organization’s strategic priorities. Most healthcare organizations operate on thin margins and so effective RCM is essential for them to continue their operations.
When talking about RCM, we often hear the discussion of whether RCM should be kept in house or whether you should work with a partner to receive RCM As a Service. Like most questions in life, the answer to this question is that it depends. Medical practices that have a great RCM leader that’s doing a great job making sure they’re paid every dollar they deserve are fine to do it in house. However, what happens when that leader leaves? What happens when your medical billing staff leave and you’re faced with the challenging task of replacing them? What if your collections fall off over time? The trend I see happening across the nation is the move to RCM As a Service because it’s really hard to do RCM in house effectively. Plus, finding the right RCM staff makes this even harder.
At the eClinicalWorks National Conference, I had a chance to hear about RCM as a Service first hand from Todd Mallon, Chief Financial Officer at Advocare. Mallon and his team at Advocare decided back in 2019 to use eCW’s RCM as a service. We wanted to know what factors contributed to their decision to move from inhouse RCM to eCW’s RCM as a service and what has been their experience with it since going live 3 years ago.
When asked about the staffing impact, Mallon shared how the difficulty finding medical billing staff helped drive the decision to look outside their 4 walls for an RCM solution and how now his staff is largely monitoring reports and results as opposed to the detailed operations of billing.
The good news is that the benefits they have seen from working with eCW’s RCM service have been great. Prior to embracing this service they’d been experiencing decreasing net collection ratio and since working with eCW’s team, they’ve been able to remedy that problem and achieve an excellent net collection ratio. As Mellon says, it’s all about that net collection ratio.
Mallon also talked about Advocare’s efforts to grow nationwide and how ensuring that they are paid every dollar they deserve is important for them to be able to serve patients in their organization. Check out our video interview with Todd Mallon from Advocare at the eCW National Conference to learn more about his experience moving to RCM As a Service.
Learn more about eClinicalWorks: https://www.eclinicalworks.com/
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