Providing healthcare is expensive. Whether you’re a major regional hospital or a neighborhood clinic, getting paid for services is the one activity that makes it possible to continue offering healthcare, yet many organizations don’t give it the attention it deserves. That’s why VeeOne Health offers telehealth revenue cycle management (RCM) services to our customers. We couldn’t very well say that we address the full continuum of healthcare without ensuring that facilities have the ongoing revenue streams they need to stay in operation.
In building our telehealth RCM offering, we looked at three key RCM challenges faced by most organizations: staff turnover, accurate telehealth billing, and revenue capture.
Staff Turnover
Let’s face it: billing for medical services is a tedious job. It takes superb attention to detail and strong concentration to do it properly. In addition, it requires a solid understanding of medical billing codes and how to apply them in widely varying circumstances. On top of that, it’s often thankless – billing managers speak up when something’s wrong, but not often enough when something is done right.
It’s no wonder, then, that billing departments have one of the highest employee turnover rates of any hospital department. Many hospitals and clinics farm the work out to professional billing firms, but these cost money, and their expertise varies considerably from one firm to the next. Some firms bring in unskilled processors at low wages and hope they’ll stick around long enough to learn proper billing practices, but often the gamble doesn’t pay off.
Accurate Telehealth Billing
Accurate telehealth billing is the key to getting paid quickly, especially when health insurance companies sometimes look for reasons to reject claims because they’re deemed “medically unnecessary.” There are hundreds of discrete billing codes, and billing processors must be able to enter the right code for each charge on bills that can run to a dozen pages or more. Moreover, Medicare billing rules change constantly, and the billing department must stay on top of those.
All in all, billing is a very tall order for hospitals and clinics, one that often delays payments unnecessarily, and one that often means that hospital administrators don’t pay enough attention to cash flow. One hospital we work with didn’t review its receivables for an entire year and ended up writing off $54 million!
Related: Solving the Whole Telehealth Challenge
Revenue Capture
Finally, there’s getting paid after a bill is submitted. Some invoices bounce back and forth from the hospital to the insurer several times before they’re finally approved. For the billing team,
this fact requires not only an intimate knowledge of procedure codes and Medicare billing rules, but also diligence and strong follow-through to ensure that payments are forthcoming
How VeeOne Helps
VeeOne Health streamlines billing operations by offering RCM services of its own. We offer a full suite of RCM services, from eligibility and benefits to coding, credentialing, and final payment. Virtually all our RCM customers find that their billing operations and receivables flows improve because of us. Here’s why.
Medical Expertise – We are, of course, intimately familiar with our VeeOne workflow management systems, so we know more about codes and procedures from the initial bill through to payment. We are also a physician-owned company, and we employ doctors and nurses to supervise our coders and billers so they can be much more successful in preparing accurate bills that are deemed medically necessary.
Higher Wages – We pay our billing staff well and have very low turnover, so our billers gain more experience and grow more and more effective over time.
Rules Awareness – We continually stay on top of changes to billing rules for private insurers as well as federal and state payers, so our bills are more accurate from initiation to completion.
Follow-Through – We pursue every bill through to revenue capture, and we report bill status regularly so hospitals will know what their cash flow will be.
In short, VeeOne Health improves the billing side of medical care just as much as it improves the healthcare services delivery side. Check out our dedicated RCM website or reach out to us at info@veeonehealth.com to learn more.
