The Importance of the Right Revenue Cycle Executive
Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) is crucial to healthcare organizations and in order to ascertain patient satisfaction and safety, healthcare must be looked at as a business. Organizations that are not profitable or that don’t have a firm grasp on their finances won’t be able to provide the services and care that their patients need. This is why placing the right revenue cycle executive makes all the difference.
The Importance of Hiring the Right Revenue Cycle Executive
The person placed as your Revenue Cycle executive will be responsible for making sure the billing cycle; providing service, submitting a claim, and getting paid runs smoothly and efficiently. The billing cycle will be repeated often, over and over again. If any part of the cycle goes awry, it puts the entire organization at risk and has the potential of throwing everything off balance. A revenue cycle should be simple, and your revenue cycle management executive should see to it that it always is.
What the Revenue Cycle Executive Does
Set Up The Patient Access System
Patient access, the registration part of the revenue cycle is incredibly important and sets the tone for the entire cycle. As such, the revenue cycle leader must put processes in place to ensure that registration is simple, clear, and easily communicated to ease the collection of data and the patient experience. While this sounds simple, it can involve everything from creating systems and policies in scheduling, registration and pre-registration, authorizations, and even financial counseling. Creating a smooth patient access may also involve vetting IT platforms that work across those various areas so that everything is centralized and prevents confusion within the revenue cycle.
Create Fee Schedules
RCM executives need to come up with the right costs to provide services so that your organization runs properly, has the resources to be prepared for a crisis, and has the capability to grow and expand. Oftentimes, they will conduct a cost study, compare costs across similar organizations, and predict events that could bring on additional costs – or savings – to your practice, group, or organization.
Update Fee Schedules
A savvy revenue cycle executive understands that fee schedules are not “set-it-and-forget-it”. Fee schedules change with legislation, local events, and even with the hiring practices of other departments. As such, your revenue cycle executive must constantly review the fee schedule, and update it as needed. The cycle for updating fee schedules will vary from organization to organization but could be anywhere from 3-12 months.
Negotiate Contracts
The right Revenue Cycle Executive will have strong analytic and negotiation skills in order to strike the right deals for your organization, those that make good financial sense.
Review Cost-Profit Structures
Your revenue cycle executive should also review costs to make sure that loss is minimized. This could be something as simple as reviewing vaccines to make sure that each vaccine administered brings in more money than it costs for the material and the hours billed for administering it.
Collaborate with Other Departments
They must also have the skills to work with leaders in other departments to bring processes to their most effective levels. For example, the financial software used should allow for the uploading of RVUs, costs, etc. If the software being used does not allow this and forces the manual input of data, both time and money are being lost.
Set up Financial Policies
Another important task is setting up financial policies such as patient responsibility. For example:
-When is the patient responsible for their payment?
-What happens when the patient can’t pay?
-What payment plans are offered?
-How is this policy communicated to patients?
How to find the right Revenue Cycle Executive
Finding the right person to fill this very important role can be both time-consuming and expensive. Working with a boutique executive search firm like Summit Talent Group will cut down on the time for your search, cost less, and result in the placement of a leader with longevity.
The team at Summit Talent Group is experienced in Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) placements. We recruit and place healthcare professionals who are practiced in revenue cycle solutions.
We are able to place the right talent because we work on a white glove model. Our team takes the time to understand your organization and its challenges. We are with you every step of the way; and unlike larger firms, we do not trickle down the search process to less experienced team members. Our executive team leads the search from start to finish.
If you need to fill a vacancy in healthcare finance, healthcare financial management, revenue cycle recovery audit, or other areas of RCM, contact us. We look forward to working with you.
Business Manager, Summit Talent Group