Blogs

Home / Blogs

Why Technology Is Key to Optimizing Your Practice Revenues

Technology is all around us. It's in our cars, our homes, our offices and even our pockets. But technology in and of itself is nothing unless we can harness its power to optimize our lives. Medical practices can benefit exponentially when technology is utilized and leveraged properly.

No area is more critical for technology than revenue optimization. Revenue is the lifeblood of your practice. Regardless of whether you are profitable or not, you need revenues to keep your doors open.

 

 

Five areas where technology can help you better optimize your practice revenues

Insurance Status Verification

When patients come in, they each have a different insurance status. Some have private insurance, some have public; some have co-pay arrangements, some don’t; some have expired insurance while others do not.

Getting these initial details can take time, and you may need to treat the patient while as you await these details. Only later do you find out that the patient should have paid a certain amount upfront or that their insurance has lapsed altogether. With technology, you can get instant confirmation of their insurance status, allowing you to take the necessary steps to ensure full payment is settled before the patient leaves the premises.

Appointment Scheduling

Missed appointments are a headache for medical practices. They cause scheduling conflicts and lost revenues. When a patient misses their appointment, it costs them nothing, but for the practice, this is revenue lost owing to the other patients turned away because the slot was booked.

With automated appointment scheduling and reminders, patients are reminded of their appointment and are allowed adequate time to cancel or revise the appointment online. In this way, the practice optimizes all the available slots in the day. It also means the practice minimizes walk-ins, which can be draining on the practice if there are too many.

Coding Accuracy

With ICD-10 in place, it’s time that doctors and medical professionals embraced technology to help determine the accuracy of recorded codes. With the current complexity of codes, it’s important that a scrubbing process be performed before submitting claims to payers. If your codes are not in order, you will get a denial or request for clarification. Too many denials will cause back-ups and lost revenues. With technology, such as an EHR, you can scrub all your records and isolate faulty codes before they are submitted to the payer. In this way, denials are nipped in the bud and revenues are optimized.

Denial and AR Follow-up

Following up denials and accounts receivable (AR) can be a daunting task, especially for a small medical practice. Are you going to treat patients, or spend all valuable time calling people up reminding them to pay, or following up with payers whenever you get a denial? With automated reminders and AR tracking, you always have a good picture of what’s going on, giving you the flexibility and peace of mind to appropriately handle these issues.

Marketing

These days, practices cannot afford to just wait for patients to show up at the door. They must go out there and attract new patients. With the web becoming the most influential marketing medium, technology holds the key to a whole new untapped market. Utilizing medical marketing technologies such as websites, search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing, your practice can distinguish itself from competition to grow your revenues exponentially.

These and other technologies have the ability to transform your practice revenues and provide you with additional funds to boost your profits and grow your business. When revenue is lost, the whole business becomes anemic and suffers.