Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) plays a major role in yielding better compensation for the healthcare industry as a whole. For the hospitals it helps reducing errors improving efficiency by creating patient data accurately and on time.
Today the entire process can be electronically managed with the help of EMR or other health information systems.
Factors Impacting RCM
For both the healthcare service providers and medical transcription firms, accuracy and timeliness are the key drivers of Revenue Cycle Management. With healthcare industry evolving every day, Medical Transcription services have started embracing technology wherever possible, for improving the overall efficiency and thereby hitting higher financial targets.
Relevance of establishing turnaround times has always been a major issue for both hospitals and medical transcription service providers. With the arrival of Electronic Health Records, medical transcription companies have started providing quality output speedily and consistently with real-time access to information. According to the former President of AHDI and the Vice President of Webmedx, Susan M. Lucci, turnaround time is critical, especially as healthcare is moving towards EHRs and real-time patient care decisions.
There is no doubt that technological developments and legislative amendments would go on changing the nature of transcription business. It will have more and more responsibilities and added opportunities to improve its financials. Recent legislative changes in healthcare viz., PPACA and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, 2010 (HCERA) are sure to get them more responsible roles to handle issues like registration services, documentation, claim processing etc. However, there can be an overall increase in volume of work without any significant rise in the billing rates, as hospitals and clinicians would try to improve efficiencies and hold back costs with the use of technology. This can adversely impact its operating margins.
Another important event expected is the regulatory changes in medical coding i.e., the shift from ICD 9 to ICD 10. This is expected to throw up several changes in revenue cycle management where medical transcription services would have a larger involvement. However, it would not be without hurdles.
The Approach
It can overcome these hurdles by managing its own revenue cycle efficiently. For this, involvement of people and process are equally essential. Ask medical transcribers what will be the first thing that they would consider for improving their productivity. Most likely the answer would be the need of a keyboard that shortcuts saving of their current document and reaching their next task in a single step operation! Another example is Speech recognition technology that has reportedly reduced the skill requirement of transcribers to a great extent which can facilitate deployment of services of some of them fruitfully elsewhere. What is implied here is elimination of steps that can be avoided.
To Conclude
Medical Transcription servicesshould use technology to improve its revenue cycle and enhance the same, quickly and efficiently. The downtime issues should be tackled by continuously monitoring productivity and replacing outdated technology with new ones. Fast upgrading of employee skills and adapting their ability to other Revenue Cycle Management services like medical coding, billing etc., would also be helpful in improving its operating margins.
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