Your holistic practice’s longevity and financial success depends on how efficiently and effectively you can manage your revenue cycle.
Without ensuring this key component of your strategy is running smoothly, you’ll be struggling to keep your practice in the green.
A comprehensive revenue cycle management strategy can really transform your holistic practice and help chart the course of your practice’s future. But what exactly is a revenue cycle and how do terms like accounting or medical billing factor in?
We’ll break it down in this article; keep reading to learn more!
What Is Revenue Cycle Management?
In the most general definition, revenue cycle management, sometimes shortened to RCM, encompasses the identification, collection, and management of a practice’s finances based on the services rendered.
In other words, RCM refers to the processes required to manage and streamline the various components of a holistic practice’s financial standing.
The typical steps of a practice’s revenue cycle are as follows:
- Patient registration and scheduling
- Prior authorizations and eligibility verification
- Patient visit and treatment
- Documentation
- Charge capture and charge entry
- Medical coding
- Medical claim submission
- Payment posting or denial
- If claims are rejected, rework and resubmit until you get the money owed
A frequently asked question regarding RCM: who exactly is involved in the revenue cycle at your holistic practice? The short answer is everyone!
This includes your
- Patients
- Payers, whether it’s insurance companies or government programs
- Staff
Anything to do with the financial side of your holistic practice is, obviously, vital for its long-term presence in your community and your ability to scale up in the future.
For instance, effectively managing rejected claims and establishing processes that address errors in your claims is a foundational step to optimizing your overall revenue cycle management strategy.
What’s the Difference Between Medical Billing and Healthcare Accounting?
Since there are so many facets of the healthcare revenue cycle, it’s easy to use other financial terms interchangeably. Take medical billing and accounting—what do these two concepts actually mean and how do they relate to your holistic practice’s RCM?
Let’s break them down here:
Medical Billing
Medical billing is the process of translating a patient’s delivery of care into a financial representation so that your practice can be reimbursed for services rendered.
This process involves medical billing codes and submitting claims to insurance companies, Medicare, the VA, or whatever other payer programs relevant to your patients, so that you can receive money from them for the services you provided.
Healthcare Accounting
On the flipside, healthcare accounting is the practice of processing and recording financial transactions; basically, what you do in your personal finances but perhaps with a few more figures thrown into the mix.
Healthcare accounting includes a few different standards for performance, such as accounts receivable and accounts payable, which are two metrics that are vital to benchmarking your holistic practice’s financial health.
Effective Revenue Cycle Management Depends on Accurate Medical Billing
As the old adage goes, time is money. Nowhere is that truer than in the case of your holistic practice’s revenue cycle! Ensuring your medical billing process is streamlined and as accurate as possible might take some time and effort to establish but will bring tremendous benefits to your practice.
A streamlined medical billing and coding process means you’re only working each of your claims once and submitting them promptly so that you can get paid in a timely manner! Reworking claims happens to the best of us, but should be the exception, not the rule.
The sooner you can minimize bottlenecks and clunky medical billing processes, the better off your practice will be!
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to Optimize Your Revenue Cycle!
Partnering with a medical billing firm to handle your medical billing can radically transform your holistic practice’s revenue cycle.
A trusted firm can empower your practice with comprehensive reporting and can act as an in-house expert for all your revenue cycle needs. With the medical billing burden off your shoulders, you can focus on what matters most: delivering quality care to your patients.
With the friendly experts at Holistic Billing Services, you’ll have decades of experience by your side who can help navigate the worlds of medical billing, healthcare software, and more! Ready to optimize your revenue cycle?
Ever heard of a patient care policy? If not, you might be wondering if your holistic practice needs one or how to write one for your practice and with so many different kinds of business writing for your practice, it can be easy to overlook one.
First, let’s define patient care–this term broadly includes the prevention, treatment, and management of illness and the preservation of physical and mental well-being through healthcare services. Sounds like that aligns with the goals of your holistic practice? It certainly does.
In this article, we’ll dive into what exactly is a patient care policy, explain the importance of one for your holistic practice, and outline how to write one yourself. Keep reading to learn more!
What Is a Patient Care Policy?
A patient care policy can take shape in a number of different ways and might differ from one practice or specialty to the next; there is no one-size-fits-all, which means you have the flexibility to put a policy together that best suits your practice.
Essentially, a patient care policy is an umbrella term for the policies that relate to caring for your patients; this might include:
Administrative Policies
This piece of writing would pertain to how your practice’s administrative workflows handle the patient from a paperwork perspective and other aspects relating to your practice’s operations overall. Examples include no show patient policies, patient-payer policies, and more!
Care Policies
These might get more in-depth as they should cover how you deliver care to your patients, what to do in the event of different patient emergencies should they arise, methods for evaluation and treatment, etc.
Communication Policies
How do you communicate with your patients? Via email, automated voicemail, social media, texting, or some other form? This is what you’d outline in this policy–how the patient can anticipate contact from you, how frequently, and more, plus their rights to opt out if they so choose.
Privacy Policies
Standards and laws, such as HIPAA, that deal with patient privacy are essential to include in this component of your practice’s patient care policy. Outline how you protect patient privacy and when your practice will be sharing patient information–such as in the event of working with insurance companies or other trusted providers.
Does Your Holistic Practice Need a Patient Care Policy?
The short answer? Yes.
The long answer? Yes, and here’s why: your patient care policy, like any kind of healthcare or holistic practice policy, is vital to ensuring consistency. Having protocols and expectations in place helps minimize any kind of miscommunications or errors across your practice.
Furthermore, writing and implementing a patient care policy at your practice strengthens compliance with important standards and laws, such as HIPAA, and can be leveraged as a foundational piece of writing when onboarding new staff members.
Since there are so many different layers to the robust patient care policy, it’s nice to have a comprehensive body of writing that addresses so many different elements of your holistic practice and the patients you treat.
How to Write a Patient Care Policy: Do’s and Don’ts
With so many different facets to one patient care policy, it might seem intimidating to start putting one together for your holistic practice.
Start here with these foundational tips:
Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
The good news is that you’re not the first holistic practice to write a patient care policy–you’re not starting from scratch! Hence there’s no need to stress about spending weeks writing this policy.
Do Your Research
Following up with the above point, do some research to see how other practices–whether holistic or traditional medical–have approached their patient care policies. This will help you get an idea of the industry’s best practices and chart a course to writing your own.
Don’t Be Too Generic
While it’s good to gain an idea of how other practices write their patient care policy, don’t be too generic or general in your own writing. Leaving out the details or particularities of how your practice cares for patients doesn’t help guide new staff members or codify processes that are important to your practice.
Do Tailor It to Your Practice and Specialty
What makes your practice stand out? Do you strive to serve the veterans in your community? Do you offer pediatric acupuncture? Multiple specialties under one roof? Factors like this will help you tailor your patient care policy to your practice and ensure that you consider the multitudes of your practice.
Don’t Let the Stress of Medical Billing Overwhelm You
Writing important documents and policies for your holistic practice isn’t exactly a piece of cake, but when you feel buried by a mountain of medical coding and billing paperwork then the pressure really settles in. Rejected claims, trying to read up on new regulations, and the overall hassle of dealing with insurance companies or Medicare programs can take a toll on your stress levels and make any additional paperwork feel burdensome.
Do Partner with Holistic Billing Services!
That’s where Holistic Billing Services is the ace up your sleeve–let our friendly experts handle the medical billing burden so you can focus on what matters most: delivering quality care to your patients.
We’ve got decades of experience and specialty-specific experts to help immediately boost your healthcare revenue cycle and put more time back in your day. Your success is our success, and we’re eager to alleviate your workload.
As you know, there are countless healthcare KPIs (key performance indicators) to review, to monitor over time, and to create goals for improving. We know that the process of pulling reports on so many different KPIs can be overwhelming and confusing, which ultimately makes the process ineffective.
That’s why we love to write various articles that emphasize and explain different metrics to track, their role in your overall operations, and best practices for analyzing them. Today we’re highlighting a financial metric that is often overlooked but which has a tremendous impact on your healthcare revenue cycle: payer reimbursements.
Keep reading to learn more about payer reimbursements, how they play a role in your holistic practice’s revenue cycle, and our top tips for evaluating them.
What Are Payer Reimbursements?
After delivering quality care to patients, the medical coding and billing process begins so that the patient, insurance company, or government program can pay for the services rendered: these are known as payer reimbursements.
Depending on how your holistic practice operates, you might bypass insurance companies or government payer programs like Medicare and opt for the patient to be solely responsible for paying for your services. On the other hand, you might accept insurance or Medicare so that you have a wider pool of patients to attract, in addition to the patient-payer model.
Either way, someone or some entity is paying for the work that you deliver to your patients, and this is why payer reimbursements is a key financial metric to be aware of and track for your holistic practice.
How Do Payer Reimbursements Affect Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle?
Here’s a well-kept secret: your holistic practice needs money to operate, sustain itself, and grow over time. Payer reimbursements affect your healthcare revenue cycle because without consistent, accurate, and timely payments, your practice can’t function.
Therefore, tracking this KPI helps you determine a baseline for your practice’s financial standing and empowers you to know where any discrepancies might be falling through the cracks. Tracking this metric means you’ll have a clear understanding of where, when, and how your holistic practice is getting paid or if there are any areas that need attention.
Top Tips for Analyzing Your Holistic Practice’s Payer Reimbursements
Check out our top tips for analyzing your holistic practice’s payer reimbursements:
Learn Your Payer Reimbursements Through and Through
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. That’s why our first tip for analyzing your practice’s payer reimbursements is to leave no stone unturned and to delve into each case. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know—so do your due diligence to investigate the current standings of your payer reimbursements!
Catching problematic patterns or infrequent inconsistencies in your payments enables you to address them before they continue to cause an unstable financial performance for your practice. Whether it’s a problem caused by inaccurate coding or a payer’s unintentional miscoordination or some other factor, your analysis gives you the power to resolve it.
Plus, with a close eye on your insurance contracts, Medicare billing processes, and patient-payers, you can spot each inaccurate payment as soon as it happens so that it doesn’t spiral into a bigger problem.
Build habits based on best practices, such as:
- Scrub insurance and Medicare claims prior to submission to ensure they’re coded properly
- Keep the lines of communication open with your payer contacts to make sure accurate rates are paid
- In the instance of any underpayment—be it your fault, or the payer’s—follow up and get every dollar you’re owed
Unless you’re applying resources to address reimbursement accuracy, you put your profitability at risk.
Evaluate Your Payer Reimbursements with These Questions
When reviewing this financial metric, ask yourself a few questions to gain a deeper understanding of what’s going on:
- Compared to your payer contracts, whether that’s with your individual patients or with an insurance company or Medicare, are the reimbursements accurate?
- Which payers are deviating from set rates?
- Are the under or overpayments happening consistently, or sporadically?
Review your data for the last six months; this is a substantial time period to examine without overwhelming yourself with trends of previous years. Ideally you won’t find any of these issues, but if you do, then you’re able to pinpoint which issues are stemming from where.
Be Conscious of Issues at the Start of the Year
Payer reimbursement issues can happen at any time but can be especially more likely when the new year rolls around in January. Inaccurate reimbursements can be the result of a misaligned fee schedule when payers have yet to update their systems with new codes and updated relative value units (RVUs).
Optimize Your Revenue Cycle with Holistic Billing Services!
Your holistic practice can’t effectively function on an ineffective revenue cycle, which is why examining your payer reimbursements metric is essential for financial success.
However, if you find yourself overwhelmed with the medical billing process, frequent issues with accurate coding, and general confusion regarding billing insurance companies or Medicare, then you’ll have an even bigger struggle for financial clarity.
Partner with the friendly experts at Holistic Billing Services to handle the complicated responsibility of your medical coding and billing processes! We’ve got billing specialists for your specialty and your success is our success.
In this day and age, nearly everything lives on the internet and it’s no secret that it’s an essential component of life, both personal and professional. The internet is an endless source of information and can positively or negatively impact your holistic practice, depending on your practice’s online reputation.
As potential clients turn to the internet to conduct research on holistic practices in their area, a phenomenon known as healthcare consumerism in which people shop around for the best care for their budget, it’s vital that your holistic practice is effectively managing its online presence and reputation.
Keep reading to learn more about the importance of your holistic practice’s presence and website plus tips for managing your online reputation!
Why Your Holistic Practice’s Online Reputation Is Important
The holistic care market is a $37 billion business, which means that general awareness and demand for holistic and alternative treatments is flourishing. How will your holistic practice attract, engage, and retain these prospective clients? Your online presence and reputation certainly play a major role here.
Let’s first break down what your online reputation includes:
- Your holistic practice’s website
- Reviews, both positive and negative
- Blog articles that your practice publishes
- Press coverage
- And more!
Research shows that 63% of patients choose one provider over another based on a strong online presence. Since patients are leveraging the internet to research holistic practices well before they ever show up to your office, appealing to them via your online presence is critical, even if you’re not trying to attract new patients.
Patients will likely form their perception of your holistic practice based on your online presence, or lack thereof, so it behooves you to shape and refine your online reputation to the best of your ability.
5 Tips for Managing Your Online Reputation
Obviously, the ideal is that every external entity views your holistic practice as an effective, high-quality place to receive treatments, but crafting this reputation isn’t easy. Let’s dig into some of our top tips for managing your practice’s online reputation:
Build a Professional-Looking Website & Optimize It for Mobile Users
The first step to managing your online presence is to have one. Your holistic practice needs a website just as any other business needs one! With so many user-friendly, no-coding-needed website building resources available like Wix or Squarespace, there’s no reason to not have a website for your holistic practice.
These do-it-yourself tools often feature an automatic version optimized for mobile users, but it’s worth noting to make sure that your site looks good on a desktop or cell phone.
Request Honest Reviews from Patients
Word of mouth marketing plays an instrumental role in influencing which businesses people patronize; in fact, 86% of customers rely on word-of-mouth recommendations and online reviews.
As such, it’s good to solicit feedback from your patients both via patient satisfaction surveys and honest online reviews. If your patients seem hesitant to leave a review because they’re worried the process is too tedious or inconvenient, then you can do a brief tutorial of how quick and easy it is to leave one.
If you’re not sure how to ask patients to rate you, here are a few suggestions:
- Hand a card to the patient with the URLs listed for key consumer rating sites and ask them to rate you
- Add a clickable link for key sites to your email signature and website
- Keep a tablet at the front desk and ask patients to post a review before leaving your office
Gaining feedback from your patients is a win-win because it validates your holistic practice’s efforts and builds the relationship between your practice and your patients. Be sure to try out different methods for requesting reviews to see which ones work best for your patients.
Upon Receiving Reviews, Engage with Them
A great step to take upon receiving reviews or questions online is to engage with them. It’s as simple as thanking someone for taking the time to leave a positive review, answering a posted question and encouraging the author to contact your office, or addressing a negative review with an apology and steps to resolve the issue, if relevant.
Your patients took the time to leave a review; it’s a good rule of thumb to respond and thank them for it!
Fill Out Every Online Profile Available for Your Business
With so many places for patients to research holistic practices, it’s beneficial to fill out and promote more than one online profile available to your business. This might include:
- Yelp!
- Bing
- Better Business Bureau
- And more!
Don’t forget to check out any local organizations or resources available to register your holistic practice’s website. Routinely keeping these profiles current can help more people discover your practice and learn about your services.
Stay Consistent in Your Online Branding
Last but not least, another top tip is to stay consistent in your online branding across all platforms. Maintaining your voice, no matter the platform, demonstrates authority, authenticity, and leaves a memorable impression in the reader’s mind. Whether it’s including your slogan or mission statement whenever relevant, or another manner for staying consistent in your online branding, it’s great to help readers learn more about your holistic practice.
Let Holistic Billing Services Handle the Medical Billing Burden!
If you’re feeling too burned out or overloaded with medical billing and coding processes, issues, or legislative updates to put creative and consistent effort into your online reputation, then let Holistic Billing Services step in!
Our friendly experts are knowledgeable in your specialty and can immediately boost your healthcare revenue cycle by handling your medical billing and coding processes. Plus, we operate as an extension of your practice, so you know that your success is our success!
Contact us today so you can focus on what matters most: your patients.
There are so many things that are part of the day-to-day of any medical practice. Scheduling, appointment reminders, credentialing providers, patient intake, managing electronic health records, billing, claims processing, appealing rejected claims, ordering PPE and other supplies, disposing of hazardous waste, patient follow up. It can often feel like a hamster wheel, with everyone balancing as many balls in the air as possible.
While it’s crucial for all of these operations to occur like a well-oiled machine, it’s also crucial to keep track of practice benchmarks. Doing so, known as healthcare benchmarking, will provide you with insights as to what is working well and what may need a modification in processes.
What is Benchmarking in Healthcare?
Healthcare benchmarking refers to measuring the performance of your medical practice against how it compares to other successful providers. Doing so helps you gauge trends and effective practices — as well as what keeps patients coming back.
When you benchmark the performance of different components within a healthcare, it helps you better define goals and to develop roadmaps to help you reach them.
The Importance of Healthcare Benchmarking
Paying close attention to performance metrics enables you to identify a lot more than simply whether your business is in the green. Yes, that is your north star; but it’s not the only component for sustainability and longevity. Additional benefits of healthcare benchmarking include:
- Productivity
- Containment of costs
- Relative value units (RVUs)
- Fair compensation
- Quality of care
- Patient experience
Taking such a comprehensive look at all the elements of your practice helps you strengthen the foundation of your business, as you can better plan for the future — and to ensure that every single step is data-driven.
Types of Holistic Practice Benchmarks
So how do you get started with healthcare benchmarking? Which metrics should you be tracking, and how can you keep it all organized? The most efficient way to do so is by grouping them by categories:
Quality of Care
The medical profession is a calling. People come to you because they trust you to diagnose, treat, and/or cure their ailments. This is a tall order, and sometimes you need the assistance of specialists; or a patient may require hospitalization. It can also pose additional challenges to receive accurate data.
Operational
In order to streamline this process, it’s essential to standardize information systems. Use the same software platforms, tools, nomenclature, and training across the board. Then pay attention to factors such as patient waiting time, ease of communication (phone, text, patient portal); their comfort while in the waiting room, their answers in patient satisfaction surveys, patient retention, employee retention.
Financial
As for financial aspects, make a list of every single element that affects your bottom line. Healthcare claims management, value-based reimbursements, healthcare payers’ claims processing, billing, supplies, compensation, and all accounts receivable and payable. How long does everything take? What’s the return on investment? Are there more beneficial players’ contracts?
Compliance
Complying with healthcare regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Act (PSQIA), the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), and myriad other regulations require lengthy processes to comply with their terms. Some of them require daily monitoring, going through a continuum, and audits. Using software that keeps track of everything and automates alerts is the most effective way to stay on top of everything.
Marketing
Having a marketing strategy is an important part of any medical practice. It’s how you spread the word about your services and attract your intended audience. And as with everything else, you should be looking at key performance indicators for healthcare benchmarking to ensure that you’re getting a return on your investment. Elements you want to track include conversion rates, cost per lead, and patient acquisition costs.
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At Holistic Billing Services, we’ve been assisting chiropractic, acupuncture, and massage therapy practices for over two decades. We are the nation’s largest billing provider for holistic healthcare, serving more than 2,500 practices across the United States.
By partnering with an experienced medical billing team, you can spend less time thinking about managing CPT coding and insurance claims, and more time scaling your practice and delivering high-quality care to your patients.
Contact us so that we can create a custom solution that aligns best with your practice’s needs.
Take a minute to reflect on your holistic practice’s current marketing strategy; where are your efforts being directed? How frequently do you check in on the performance of your marketing efforts? How can you tell if they’re effective or if they need refining?
Marketing is an essential element of nearly every business or organization, of course, but the number of metrics at your fingertips can be overwhelming. Or, if you haven’t invested a lot of energy into your marketing strategy, then you might be unsure where to start or how to approach it.
In this article, we’ll tackle how marketing impacts your holistic practice and which metrics to track for success.
How Does Marketing Impact Your Holistic Practice?
Marketing entails a whole host of efforts and initiatives that impact your practice in a few manners:
Attract New Patients
Your patients won’t know you exist without some type of marketing strategy. Whether that’s word of mouth from current clients, search results advertisements, setting up a table at a local event, or something else, your holistic practice needs to market itself in order to make your community aware of your services.
Plus, if your marketing efforts are the first time a future client has ever heard of you, you’re able to make a great impression and lead with your best foot forward!
Keep Patients Informed of New Initiatives
Marketing is also great for your current clients to retain them and inform them of any new initiatives that you’re developing. For example, you might be moving to a bigger location and bringing on another practitioner. You can make a great marketing campaign around this, which is both engaging and informative!
This is important to take into consideration when building out your marketing strategy ideas because retaining a client is cheaper than attracting a new one; be sure your branding speaks to your current clients and keeps them in the loop with your practice.
Build Your Reputation
Beyond attracting and retaining your clients, marketing is how you build and refine your holistic practice’s reputation. Do you have decades of experience within your community? Do you make a point of volunteering in your community? Cater specifically to veterans in your area? Whatever makes your practice special is what you should convey in your marketing efforts.
This helps build rapport with clients, both current and potential, and establishes your practice in your community.
Marketing Metrics: What to Track
Now that we’ve addressed how marketing can be a powerful tool to leverage and have a significant impact on your holistic practice, let’s look into three key marketing metrics to track along the way:
Cost Per Lead (CPL)
This metric calculates the total amount spent on a marketing campaign and divides it by the number of leads your holistic practice got as a result:
Cost of Campaign / Number of Leads = Cost Per Lead
For example, if you spent $1000 on a campaign and you got 50 leads from it, then the cost per lead would be $20. On the other hand, if you spent $1000 but only received 10 leads, then the CPL is $100.
It’s important to note that the only way you can effectively calculate this metric is if you know the specific origin of a new lead. That’s why it’s helpful to ask your new leads how they heard about you; did they see an advertisement on social media? Hear about you from a friend? Tracking these origins is great to know where new leads are coming from.
Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC)
Patient acquisition cost provides you with the number of paying patients your holistic practice earns from a particular marketing campaign:
Cost of Campaign / Number of Paying Patients = Patient Acquisition Cost
This marketing metric helps you understand the more real, tangible cost of bringing in new revenue to your holistic practice. Following the same example, if 10 leads of the pool of 50 turns into actual paying clients, then the PAC is $100.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Figuring the ROI on a marketing campaign involves just a little more math and looks something like this:
Income Derived / Cost of Campaign X 100 = ROI
This first factor, the total income earned, involves you calculating the lifetime value of a patient. Let’s say each of the 10 new patients you acquired spends around $800 over the course of their relationship with your practice. That total amount would be $8,000.
$8,000 / $1,000 X 100 = 800%
This metric is helpful for monitoring the overall revenue generated from a particular marketing effort. This perspective is helpful for determining if a marketing campaign was “successful” depending on your holistic practice’s expectations or if something should be tweaked in the future.
Let Holistic Billing Services Streamline Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle!
Wish you had more time to spend refining your marketing efforts and engaging with the patients in your holistic practice? Find yourself overwhelmed and frustrated trying to figure out new billing regulations? Tired of dealing with rejected medical claims or medical coding inaccuracies that bring your healthcare revenue cycle to a stop? Partner with Holistic Billing Services to handle all your medical coding and billing needs!
Our team of experts has decades of experience and expertise in your specialty, so you know you’re in good hands. We know you just want to get back to what matters most: your patients. We’re eager to help, so contact us today!
Your holistic practice exists to deliver quality care to your community; no matter what specialty you offer, it’s crucial that your patients recognize, value, and return to your practice. After all, you won’t last long if you don’t attract patients!
But how can you go beyond simply making your patients aware of your practice and foster a long-term, genuine connection between you, your practice, and your community? How can you instill patient loyalty in a manner that is sincere and beneficial to the future of your practice?
Patient loyalty is a key component of your healthcare revenue cycle and this article strives to provide you with the context and measures to take in order to grow and nurture it within your practice. Keep reading to learn more!
How Does Patient Loyalty Impact Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle?
Let’s look at a few key statistics regarding customer loyalty that can apply to your holistic practice:
- 82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition
- 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers
- Increasing customer retention by just 5% boosts profits by 25% to 95%
As with any business venture, minimizing churn and turnover results in a more stabilized, consistent revenue stream. It’s cheaper to keep the customer you already have than to attract a new customer to replace them.
This directly applies to your holistic practice and your overall healthcare revenue cycle! Putting in the effort and developing an enduring, profitable relationship with your patients leads to a better revenue cycle and empowers you to scale your business as more patients come your way. But how can you achieve genuine patient loyalty?
How to Instill Patient Loyalty in Your Holistic Practice
Patient loyalty can be nurtured in a variety of manners in addition to providing excellent holistic services! Consider these tips to further solidify the relationship between your practice, your patients, and your community:
Create and Maintain a Comfortable, Clean Environment
Nobody wants to enter a place of business that is disorganized, dusty, or cluttered—particularly not in a holistic environment where wellness, healing, and good energy are synonyms with your business. From the steps leading up to your practice to the waiting room, bathroom, and everything along the way, make an effort to reflect your holistic values in the environment of your practice.
This might include:
- Dusting shelves, decorations, ledges, etc once a week
- Burning incense
- Softly playing relaxing music
- Sanitizing high-touch points
- Keeping your waiting room clean and organized without making it crowded with furniture or other objects
- Maintaining a clean, sanitary bathroom for patients
- And more!
Setting the tone for your patients’ experience and delivering a fantastic first and lasting impression is a surefire way to get patients returning to your office again and again.
Be Professionally and Administratively Organized
Scrambling to find a patient’s misplaced file or having a desk littered with sticky notes doesn’t bode well for appearing to run your practice smoothly and efficiently. Your patients want to see that your office is professional and organized, meaning they can trust you to deliver a great experience in terms of treatment and administration.
From answering the phone in a clear, consistent manner to handling scheduling conflicts and following up with patients about any billing issues, your holistic practice needs to be on its game to demonstrate trust and loyalty.
Build Rapport with Your Patients and Create an Individualized Treatment Plan For Each of Them
If you and any team members appear cold or indifferent to a patient, that can leave a negative impression. Instead, make an effort to engage the patient in conversation and use their name in communication. Deploying active listening skills and exhibiting you have an interest in your patient—not their pocketbook—can help build patient loyalty, engagement, and overall satisfaction.
Taking this even further means creating an individualized treatment plan for each of your patients and maintaining a dialogue with them about it. While this might sound like common sense, and that’s great if it does, making the effort to inform each patient about their treatment plan, check in with them over time, and encourage questions are all great ways to nurture patient loyalty.
Leverage the Power of Social Media
Social media platforms can be the ace up your sleeve if you leverage them appropriately for your holistic practice. Use your accounts to post about:
- Upcoming events, like open houses or charity events
- Holidays or moments in history related to your practice’s specialty
- Polls to get patient feedback, such as which composer to play in the office next
- Encourage honest reviews
- Some personal, yet professional, information about you and your practice—for example, showing off your beloved pet so that patients can get to know you a little better
Social media doesn’t have to be overwhelming or feel superfluous if you build and facilitate engagement with your patients!
Leave Your Medical Billing Stress to the Experts at HBS!
Want to deepen the relationship between you, your practice, and your community but feel overwhelmed with the medical coding and billing process? Find yourself frequently fielding questions from patients regarding the status of their claims? Unsure if you should accept insurance, how to bill Medicare, and have other important questions relating to your healthcare revenue cycle?
Turn to the experts at Holistic Billing Services to effectively handle your medical billing and coding so that you can get back to what matters most: your patients. Our team of friendly professionals has experience in your expertise and we’re eager to help your practice thrive so you remain a cornerstone in your community!
Your patients and your healthcare revenue cycle are more connected than you might think. Attracting new patients and providing great holistic care are two essential components of your revenue, but what else can you do to ensure your revenue cycle continues moving smoothly? How can you deepen the relationship between your holistic practice and your community in a manner that is sincere and still profitable?
Developing patient education resources for your patients and initiating conversations can have a significant impact. You might already be taking these steps in the natural flow of your practice’s operations, but making them an intentional part of your patient interactions can lead to a better patient experience and revenue cycle.
Keep reading to learn more about the different types of patient education resources, the link between patient engagement and your holistic practice’s revenue cycle, and some tips for fostering this engagement in your practice!
Different Types of Patient Education Resources
Patient education resources come in a variety of shapes and sizes and can be wholly custom to fit your specialty and your patients. Depending on what services you offer and what type of clients you have, your patient education materials can include one-on-one teaching, analogies, or any of the following tools:
- Brochures and other printed materials
- Podcasts
- YouTube videos
- Posters or charts
- Models or props
- And more!
The goal of patient education resources is to supplement the patient experience with opportunities to further learn and engage with their care. For example, a dermatology practice might have brochures explaining different skin conditions, perhaps one each for eczema or psoriasis, whereas an acupuncture practice might have posters that visually explain how the treatment works. It’s important to utilize the most appropriate medium of communication so your patient has the greatest chance of learning from your efforts.
The Link Between Patient Education, Patient Outcomes, and Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle
As the saying goes, knowledge is power. Patient education further builds rapport between your patient and your holistic practice, which leads to trust and a continued relationship. Increasing the patient lifetime value by attracting and retaining clients, naturally, helps your holistic practice’s overall healthcare revenue cycle. Plus, a client who is delighted by your services will spread the word about your practice and could lead to new patient relationships.
Patient education also leads to better patient outcomes as they learn more about their treatment and wellness plan. In fact, just 45 minutes of patient education can improve outcomes for patients with chronic diseases, according to a study in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. As patients gain a greater understanding of their conditions, the treatment that your holistic practice offers, and how to manage chronic conditions on their own, they become empowered and engaged in the process.
Delivering great care and equipping your patients with the tools they need to effectively engage with their healthcare journey demonstrates your practice’s dedication to their success—which leads to a better healthcare revenue cycle. Furthermore, providing resources relating to patient-payer relationships and how healthcare billing works can better inform your patients of their role within the revenue cycle.
3 Tips to Boost Your Revenue Cycle With Patient Education
Ready to further your patient education resources while boosting your revenue cycle? Check out these tips for each part of the patient’s journey with your holistic practice:
Initiate Clear Conversations About Payment Responsibility Prior to the Appointment
Your holistic practice’s reception desk plays an important role in the patient-practice relationship. This is where first and lasting impressions are formed, educating patients about their role in the healthcare revenue cycle takes place, and where patients should feel encouraged to ask questions.
The front desk is perfect for providing patients with information regarding co-pays, any insurance policies that are or aren’t accepted by your holistic practice, disseminating no-show policy papers, and more. It’s a great opportunity to welcome the patient into the practice and initiate clear conversations about payment responsibility.
Plus, if a returning patient has a balance remaining from a previous visit, this is a good time to gently but firmly bring it up and ask the patient for payment. Not verifying that the patient is in good standing—or not feeling confident in bringing it up—leads to a sluggish healthcare revenue cycle since you’re leaving money on the table.
Provide Patient Education Resources During the Visit
Your patients come to your practice for quality care and trust you and your staff to deliver on that. Along the way, it’s important to gauge how involved they are with what treatment plans you and other pertinent healthcare providers have coordinated for the patient.
Facilitating a conversation about why they’re at your practice, how your holistic services are contributing to a better quality of life, and encouraging them to ask questions along the way demonstrates a commitment to care. Plus, presenting a tangible education resource like a pamphlet or literature related to their wellness journey empowers them to do research on their own and ask questions as needed.
Your holistic practice’s revenue cycle benefits from returning patients who tell their loved ones about your practice and who value the time spent with your practice, making them less likely to be chronically absent from their appointments.
After the Appointment, Help Patients Navigate Their Bills and Gather Their Feedback Via Surveys
If your patient’s initial encounter with your practice’s reception desk entailed learning about their payment responsibilities, then the same reception desk after the appointment shouldn’t lead to any sticker shock. Staying proactive in conversations with your patients about their role in the healthcare revenue cycle boosts transparency in your practice and fosters trust between your patients and your practice.
Following the appointment, collect patient payment and their feedback via patient satisfaction surveys. Directly collecting payment, of course, benefits your revenue cycle by bringing in revenue to your practice. Gathering patient feedback is one more touchpoint for building rapport and reflects your practice’s commitment to providing an overall positive experience. With this information, you can make changes as needed to improve the patient experience!
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to Boost Your Healthcare Revenue Cycle!
Wish you had more time to engage your patients in conversation and develop patient education resources that suit them? Feel like you’re always swamped in medical coding and billing issues, rejected claims, and new legislative initiatives that impact healthcare billing?
Partner with Holistic Billing Services to streamline your healthcare revenue cycle and enjoy an immediate return on your investment with minimal inaccuracies, timely billing efforts, and a team of experts that’s always on top of new regulations. Our experts have experience in your specialty and we’re eager to help your practice focus on what matters most: your patients.
Contact us today!
The healthcare revenue cycle is fraught with various moving parts and pieces that can throw a wrench in your financial performance; one such example is that of rejected claims, which can delay your payment for services rendered, cause extra stress, and result in lower financial performance for your holistic practice.
The ideal metric for tracking the performance of your claims processing strategy is to have a 95% or higher clean claims rate—in other words, you want to aim for at least 95% of your claims to be processed without issue. These clean claims demonstrate that your medical coding and medical billing approach is effective and efficient. Reworking rejected claims costs your practice time and money, plus it causes unnecessary headaches.
While a 95% clean claims rate is ideal, the reality is that practices average 75-85% clean claims, which means that up to a quarter of revenue is being held up by rejected claims. If your holistic practice accepts insurance or patients covered by Medicare, then this can significantly stymie your healthcare revenue cycle.
Hence minimizing rejected claims is a priority; in this article, we’ll dive into how rejected claims help your practice, hinder your practice, and some best practices for the medical billing and coding process.
How Rejected Claims Help Your Practice
It might sound counterintuitive, but if you shift your perspective to see rejected claims as something that can help your holistic practice, then you’re already on the right track.
Rejected claims can present an important opportunity for your holistic practice’s overall revenue cycle in terms of revealing the points of improvement in your medical coding and billing process.
Rejected claims were, more often than not, rejected for important reasons—maybe the claim wasn’t completely filled out, perhaps the codes were inaccurate or didn’t fully illustrate the services rendered, or something else happened.
Gather your rejected claims over the last 6 months or so and evaluate the frequency of claims being rejected, the reasons for the rejection, and the average time it took to correct and resubmit the claims. Armed with this information, you’ll notice where the points of improvement exist within your medical billing process.
Maybe you need to update the list of frequently-used medical billing codes that you reference when filling out your claims or perhaps one important part of the claim is constantly left blank by accident. Whatever the case, taking the time to see why the rejected claims are happening can empower you and your holistic practice to refine your internal medical billing and medical coding process.
Since insurance or CMS claims can be a significant portion of your holistic practice’s overall healthcare revenue cycle, rejected claims can reveal where your financial performance needs more attention or education.
How Rejected Claims Hurt Your Practice
Of course, on the other hand, if you can avoid dealing with rejected claims then you should absolutely do so! These types of claims cost your holistic practice time and money and negatively impact your revenue cycle.
By having to spend more time reworking a claim, you’re unable to focus on more strategic initiatives like your marketing presence or attend to patient feedback. Plus, this time spent costs money; whether it’s the time you spend on the clock or paying for a team member to tackle the rejected claims issues, reworking claims can be costly.
If the average cost for filing a claim is $6.50, the average cost of a reworked claim is $25. This might not be too bad to deal with when only one or two claims need to be reworked, but if your holistic practice is dealing with dozens of rejected claims, then this amount can quickly add up!
For example, if you have 100 rejected claims in one month, you’ll have to spend an additional $2,500 per month. Now, think about it from an annual standpoint—that’s a whopping $30,000 each year. Plus, rejected claims result in delayed reimbursement, which slows down your practice’s revenue cycle and skews your financial performance metrics.
4 Steps to Minimize Rejected Claims
So what are some steps you can take to minimize the amount of rejected claims your holistic practice has to deal with? Check out these tips:
Verify Patient Eligibility Prior to the Date of Service
Established patients are great for your practice, but make sure you don’t assume their insurance coverage hasn’t changed over time. Simply asking them at every visit if their coverage has changed or if they have any patient information updates can save you and your practice time later down the line. Outdated patient information is a tremendous source of rejected claims, so take the extra minute ahead of time to confirm your patient’s information before proceeding with the claim.
Double-Check Medical Coding Modifiers
The world of medical coding and medical billing is complex and intimidating; one crucial step in the medical coding process is to verify that you’re utilizing the correct medical coding modifiers. These modifiers might seem too small to matter, but your claim can be rejected if not appropriately coded!
File Your Claims In a Timely Manner
Insurance companies and CMS typically require you to submit claims within a tight window of time, and missing that window can increase your chances of a rejected claim. Be sure to pay attention to claim filing deadlines and keep in contact with the pertinent insurance company if you encounter issues or have questions. Resolving any issues before filing a claim—while staying within the timeline—can help ensure your claim goes through without any troubles.
Outsource Your Medical Billing Altogether
If you find yourself and your team members swamped with rejected claims and simply wish you could make that part of your holistic practice disappear, then it’s time to consider partnering with a medical billing firm!
Outsourcing your medical coding and medical billing process to a trusted partner can immediately boost your revenue cycle and keep your holistic practice’s finances running smoothly. Plus, with the medical billing partner, you won’t have to worry about keeping up with esoteric legislation that impacts the billing process or stress about reworking claims since they’ll be handled correctly from the beginning.
Consider partnering with Holistic Billing Services to comprehensively manage your medical billing process so that you can focus on what matters most: your patients. Our experts have experience in your specialty, and we’re eager to help your holistic practice thrive!
Healthcare legislation can be tricky to navigate, especially when you’ve got a million other things on your plate. However, it’s still essential to keep up with because it can impact your holistic practice, healthcare revenue cycle, and patients.
One recent example is the No Surprises Act, which affects you, your patients, and your revenue cycle. This piece of healthcare legislation essentially aims to refine the medical billing process at the federal level—and we’ll dive into the details in this article here.
Keep reading to learn more about the No Surprises Act and its effects on your holistic practice!
What Is the No Surprises Act?
To sum up the No Surprises Act in one sentence? It’s intended to comprehensively mitigate surprise medical bills, which often occur when insured patients inadvertently receive care from out-of-network providers.
At the end of 2020, this piece of healthcare legislation was signed into law to provide federal-level protections for consumers against surprise medical bills. According to the handy Key Takeaways listed for the No Surprises Act, this legislation:
- Protects patients from receiving surprise medical bills resulting from gaps in coverage for emergency services and certain services provided by out-of-network clinicians at in-network facilities, including by air ambulances.
- Holds patients liable only for their in-network cost-sharing amount, while giving providers and insurers an opportunity to negotiate reimbursement.
- Allows providers and insurers to access an independent dispute resolution process in the event disputes arise around reimbursement; the legislation does not set a benchmark reimbursement amount.
- Requires both providers and health plans to assist patients in accessing health care cost information.
This Act was part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, which handled a variety of public health and private insurance issues, and a majority of the initiatives outlined in this legislation took effect on January 1, 2022. The Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), Treasury, and Labor are responsible for issuing regulations and guidance to implement many of the regulations.
How Does The No Surprises Act Impact Your Holistic Practice?
While sections of this new legislation won’t apply to your holistic practice—such as sections 105 and 106 that deal with air ambulance services and charges—there are still some important parts that might impact your practice, especially if you’re contracted with private health insurance companies.
The primary effect that this healthcare legislation has on the medical billing process is that out-of-network providers can’t bill patients for excessive charges, nor can the patient be held responsible for such charges.
How Does This Healthcare Legislation Impact Your Patients?
Ultimately, the No Surprises Act leads to enhanced transparency and patient engagement in the financial workings of your holistic practice. By increasing patient understanding of the medical billing process and what they are responsible for in the healthcare revenue cycle, patients can make informed decisions regarding their care.
Patient education and patient engagement are vital for your holistic practice, regardless of accepting insurance. Initiating the conversation with your patients about their responsibility for paying for services rendered is helpful because it encourages their questions and concerns. Utilizing these lines of communication can build rapport and trust between your patients and your holistic practice.
3 Medical Billing Tips for Your Holistic Practice
Whether your holistic practice is significantly or minimally, your healthcare revenue cycle and medical billing process can always benefit from a few tips:
Keep Patient Information Updated
From contact information to insurance carriers and more, there’s a lot of patient information that can change over time. Inaccurate patient information can lead to denied claims, which can throw a wrench in your holistic practice’s revenue cycle. Be sure to verify your patient’s data hasn’t changed or update their profile with new information on a regular basis to ensure nothing slips through the cracks.
Use Appropriate Codes and Modifiers
Medical coding accuracy plays a critical role in your practice’s revenue cycle; inaccurate or incomplete claims that use the wrong codes or modifiers can result in rejected claims that need to be reworked. Any additional time spent reworking claims means it’s costing your practice time and money instead of bringing in your reimbursement! Keep a list of frequently-used codes and modifiers so that you won’t have to look too hard for them when you’re filing claims.
Streamline Your Medical Billing Process by Partnering with a Medical Billing Firm!
Medical billing firms make it their job to stay updated on new healthcare legislation initiatives and ensure your revenue cycle is as optimized as possible. If your holistic practice is swamped with piles of claims that need to be filed or reworked, then it’s time to consider partnering with a medical billing firm to handle it.
With a medical billing partner, you’ll enjoy an immediate boost to your revenue cycle, more time to focus on patients, develop strategic moves for your practice, and gain insight into your financial performance.
Partner with Holistic Billing Services Today!
The experts at Holistic Billing Services are as invested in your success as you are—we work as an extension of your holistic practice! We’ve got experience in your specialty and can help you navigate the complexities of the medical coding and billing process so that you can focus on what matters most: delivering great care to your patients.
We offer a variety of acupuncture billing services, massage therapy billing services, and chiropractic billing services, including:
- Online insurance verifications
- EHR and SOAP documentation
- Insurance claims processing
- Insurance credentialing