Coronavirus disease had a huge impact on various aspects of our lives including a whole range of medical services. Since the risk of transmission is high in crowded places and people with comorbidity risks have a higher susceptibility to the disease, many healthcare providers and patients preferred postponing the hospital visits of patients who didn’t need emergency healthcare. This has largely impacted the revenue cycle of healthcare facilities and RCM services experts need to address the loss of revenues tactfully.
Every patient who needs surgery as a way to correct his/her health condition has two options for surgery depending on the careful diagnosis by the healthcare provider – urgent or emergency surgery and elective surgery. An urgent or emergency surgery is done where it is an urgent medical condition and sometimes the condition could be life-threatening. Surgeries for acute appendicitis and trauma are examples of emergency surgery. This type of surgery needs to be carried out regardless of the other prevailing conditions. Elective surgery is one that can be scheduled in advance in contrast to the emergency one. An elective surgery could be done to improve the quality of life and in some cases, it could be to treat serious conditions such as cancer and heart diseases. Any surgery right from the one done to remove a wart to one performed to remove kidney stones can be an example of elective surgery. When such elective surgeries are postponed due to the fear of transmission of infectious diseases, it leads to revenue loss and is a matter of concern for both the healthcare providers and RCM services providers.
Some health conditions need expensive treatment and also have a high readmission rate. Heart failure is an example of such conditions and from a patient’s perspective, postponement of elective surgeries for such conditions can be costly due to the additional yearly medical expenditure incurred. And, from the healthcare providers’ viewpoint, reduced revenues affect the revenue cycle management and create operating constraints.
Although there are no procedures that can help the healthcare facilities to totally avoid the losses due to postponement of elective surgeries, some solutions as suggested by the best RCM services experts can reduce the burden significantly. The first thing you must do as a healthcare facility is optimizing returns on the services that you are providing. The key to ensuring this is hiring the best medical coding and RCM services providers who can maintain the highest levels of coding accuracy and submit flawless claims to maximize the reimbursements from the insurance providers by reducing denial and rejections.
If you don’t have the right RCM services partner, it could get difficult for you to sustain in this pandemic situation because without a robust revenue cycle management process, you can’t get appropriate revenues for even the services provided. This will not only reduce your revenues but will lead you to losses eventually. To improve your RCM process and work towards financial recovery in these tough times, it is imperative that you hire the top RCM services providers who have the experience and expertise to work in challenging times and steer you towards greater revenues and profits.