Making Revenue Cycle Solutions Accessible To Your Clients

By Megan Williams, contributing writer

With all the talk of the importance of revenue cycle management for hospitals and clinics, we may be reaching a point where a new look at solutions is needed.

Your clients are looking for solutions that address their financial woes in ways that are sustainable, and clearly beneficial. It is time to start rethinking revenue cycle management (RCM) offerings, and a survey from Black Book holds some potential ideas that you might find useful.

Survey Results

Hospitals are walking away from niche revenue cycle solutions according to the latest Black Book Poll (GlobeNewsire). While the growth of the revenue cycle market has given rise to niche vendors in areas like eligibility and patient bill estimation, many facilities are walking away from niche expertise, and have instead turned to end-to-end outsourcing service vendors, and the comprehensive solutions they offer.

These more complex RCM offerings have swelled to match the 20 percent growth rate among hospitals that are looking for integrated, end-to-end financial solutions that also take into account ancillary aspects of the complete revenue cycle.

According to Doug Brown, managing partner of Black Book Market Research LLC, “After carefully identifying and assessing their organizations’ core competencies, hundreds of hospitals have moved to outsourced RCM services over the last two years. It has been no surprise that many overwhelmed hospital leaders have realized that RCM isn’t their organization’s core competency, and have turned to large end-to-end outsourcing firms for RCM to refocus on patient care and clinical service delivery.”

Additional Results

Black Book has estimated the value of RCM outsourcing to currently stand at $7.7 billion, with a projected growth to just under $10 billion by the middle of 2016, with much of that growth squarely attributed to end-to-end service vendors.

Of hospitals of more than 200 beds, 83 percent that have moved to outsource “all or most of their RCM operations” have credited a turnaround in post-outsourcing RCM proficiencies with a 5.3 percent year-to-date revenue increase. For hospitals of less than 200 beds, that number stands at 6.2 percent.

The survey includes results from 2,250 CFOs, CIOs, business office managers, tech and financial services staffers. The survey also represented 445 hospitals from 40 different states.

Other key findings include insight into financial leader behavior, capital access at time of decision making, and the number of hospitals who are looking to RCM solutions as their final defense against bankruptcy.

Going Deeper

This is an opportunity for ISVs: Are your RCM clients happy? Could you offer them more flexible, managed services? Do they simply not understand the financial benefits of the tech solutions you offer? For additional information, read “The Benefits of Revenue Cycle Management For Healthcare.”