An increase in Account Receivable from one period to another indicates that payments such as copays (and increasingly, deductibles for those patients with high-deductible health plans) are not being collected upfront. It threatens the cash flow of the practice. In growing healthcare practice, it is necessary to keep track of claims that are billed but to receive from payers especially insurance accounts receivables. Today cash at hand is very critical as margins have tightened and the healthcare industry recovers from the economic troubles brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In short, if your practice wants more cash at hand then your AR days should be minimum, and you need to understand the benchmarking criteria for A/R aging which is explained in the following brief.
In this article, you will understand how you can decrease aging accounts receivable and increase staff efficiency with the help of practice management (PM) software.
How to decrease aging accounts receivable?
As you have already known that every healthcare practice needs to lower the days for A/R to improve financial health and proper AR management helps you in this. As said earlier, if you would like to know the financial health of the medical practice, then you should look for the results of the A/R aging report.
The benchmarks are as follows:
- 0 to 30 days or less indicates the good financial health
- 31 to 60 days indicates the average financial health
- 61 to 90 days or more indicates the poor financial health
However, PM software can offer various benefits, especially you can reduce aging accounts receivables as automation technology enables the creation of workflows for staff based on several factors such as date of service, cash collection opportunity, and denial code receivables. Moreover, various software packages and less intervention of manual A/R workflows are also important factors to reduce aging accounts receivable.
Now, you have a glimpse of PM software for A/R still, if you are struggling with aging accounts receivable and your billing department can’t keep a track of it then it would be a great idea to outsource your medical billing services to an experienced medical billing company like us.
We use PM software to keep a check on your A/R and whenever we encounter claim denials, our AR team starts chasing the payers to understand the reason for denial and re-submit claims with corrected actions to get reimbursement faster and our clients enjoy lesser AR aging buckets.
If you are struggling with aging accounts receivable and your billing department can’t keep a track of it then it would be a great idea to outsource medical billing services to an experienced medical billing company like us. With the help of practice management software is it easy to keep a check on your AR as well as we take follow-ups of denied claims for early reimbursement.
Increase staff efficiency
PM software can bring significant improvement in the areas that may be challenging for your staff like the 31-to-60-day and 61-to-90-day aging bucket. Part from that, your staff can identify both high-value claims that will be worth the time and resources to chase and low-cash opportunity claims which are not worth spending time on. This will save a lot of precious time of your staff and improves overall productivity with enhanced job satisfaction.
Moreover, most of the employees are working from home due to the covid-19 pandemic which leads to challenges of remote working but with the help of PM software practitioners can track productivity and assign the direction of work for their staff as far as insurance accounts receivable are concerned.
Finally, we conclude that automation of the whole PM software needs a transformation, and most healthcare organizations are hesitant to adopt it. But it will be a boon for every healthcare practitioners because apart from reducing aging accounts receivable and improving staff efficiency PM software is key in improving the patient experience by offering them various digital ways to pay medical bills online, access clinical and financial information via patient portals, and receive communications through email or text.
Finally, we conclude that automation of the whole RCM needs a transformation and most healthcare organizations are hesitant to adopt it. You can get in touch with us to know more about how we can help you to reduce your aging account receivable.
