How RCM Solutions Can Help Part-3
In this 3-part blog series, we explore the most common causes of physician burnout—and offer practical strategies for easing burnout through revenue cycle management tools, partnerships, and approaches. Read the first blog in this series, “Want to Ease Administrative Burnout for Docs? Take a Look at Your RCM Processes.” Then, read the second blog in this series, “Is Regulatory Alphabet Soup Stressing Your Practice Out? These RCM Strategies Can Help” to learn more about combating burnout through an RCM partnership.”
Doctors Are Drowning in Data – Here’s How an RCM Partner Can Help
These days, data is coming at physicians from all directions, including patients’ digital health apps, home health monitoring technologies as well as data feeds from the electronic health record (EHR)—and it’s making a deep impact on physicians’ feelings of burnout and stress:
- Ninety-four percent of physicians find digital health data overwhelming, redundant and unlikely to make a difference in care management
- Interviews with thousands of Mayo Clinic clinicians found that among the tens of thousands of pieces of data coming in through the EHR, only 60 pieces of data are critical to meeting the patient’s care needs
- The amount of data that pours in through the EHR has left physicians feeling like “unhappy desk clerks”
Sifting through such data at the point of care can be a daunting challenge for physicians, but it’s not an insurmountable one, especially with support from an experienced revenue cycle management (RCM) partner. Here are three ways the right RCM partner will ease the pressures of data overload for your medical staff.
Develop customized EHR alerts.
Providing the right information in the correct format at the appropriate point in the physician’s workflow is critical to combatting burnout and stress. It also supports a healthier bottom line by ensuring physicians:
- Know which patients are covered under value-based contracts
- See which patients have recently been treated in the emergency department—opening the door for discussions around less expensive options for care plans
- Understand the social determinants of health that could be impacting the patient’s ability to access care in the office or pay their bills for medications
For EHR alerts to serve as more than just noise, they must be designed with input from clinicians. A true RCM partner will collaborate in designing smart EHR alerts that matter to physicians and have the potential to make a deep impact on health and revenue.
Position front-desk staff to use data to support care management.
For example, rules for transitional care management (TCM) require that physician practices call patients within two business days of discharge; otherwise, a TCM claim will be denied. It’s not reasonable to expect physicians to know when a discharge has occurred, given the sheer amount of data physicians are confronted with daily. However, an RCM partner could assist your physician’s practice in setting up a data feed that alerts front-desk staff to recent patient discharges. With that information in hand, these team members can be trained to make contact with TCM patients in the right timeframe and document it appropriately. This alleviates administrative burden for physicians, elevates quality of care, and helps prevent denials.
Rethink the way you analyze performance.
From an administrative perspective, one of the frustrating aspects of participating in federal value-based performance programs is making sense of payer reports. The right RCM partner will help you:
- Pull out key insights from data regarding areas of strength and weakness—both for the practice as a whole and by individual physician
- Design actionable strategies for improvement during the current contract year, enhancing patient care and health outcomes while protecting revenue
- More effectively track and management performance under these contracts utilizing various data collected during the partnership
When these insights are distributed to physicians in highly visual, easy-to-read reports, physicians become empowered with practical strategies for improved care and performance. Further, data is far more manageable, and stress is significantly reduced.
Talk to Us
Pulse Revenue Cycle Management is highly skilled in designing practical ways to alleviate data overload for physicians while boosting the practice’s bottom line. Learn more about PulseRCM.