Deciding how to manage your revenue cycle is one of the most important decisions you will make for your practice. From amplifying cash flow and maximizing productivity to preventing errors and maintaining compliance, effective dental revenue cycle management (RCM) is crucial for practice growth. When determining whether to manage these tasks in-house or outsource operations, consider how these five factors will impact your practice:
1. Operational Costs
Hiring an in-house RCM team is a substantial financial investment. In addition to paying salaries, your practice will also absorb the costs associated with training, software, and turnover. Likewise, if your billing staff are not accustomed to dental RCM, they’ll have to slowly climb the learning curve while also adapting the specific rules of your practice — meaning lower productivity and more opportunities for error.
On the contrary, outsourcing revenue cycle functions to a specialized partner lowers the risk of your financial investment with a fixed-cost structure that provides greater consistency and predictability for your bottom line. On average, outsourcing RCM can reduce your administrative expenses by up to 18%.1 Moreover, an outsourced team ensures complete billing accuracy, helping your practice prevent common errors and get paid in full.
2. Practice Efficiency
An in-house billing department must divide its attention between front-end verification, claims submission, patient contact, insurance follow-up, denial management, and countless other processes crucial to the bottom line — all while trying to uphold the highest standard of patient care. Employee time off and turnover can quickly and unexpectedly derail revenue cycle operations.
Partnering with a third-party billing team safeguards your practice from internal staffing challenges, working behind the scenes to submit, process, and manage claims every step of the way, allowing your staff to focus entirely on patient care without concerns around billing deadlines and revenue cycle demands.
3. Financial Transparency
Overseeing your revenue cycle in-house doesn’t always mean you’re getting access to the most up-to-date billing data. An overwhelmed RCM department is likely days or even weeks behind, creating delays in claims processing workflows which, in turn, fail to provide the financial transparency your practice needs to truly analyze revenue cycle health. According to one report, providers lose up to 20% of revenue due to faulty RCM — errors that should have been identified and resolved long before they impact the bottom line.1
A core advantage of outsourcing RCM is the ability to evaluate the full picture of revenue cycle performance, leveraging automation and cloud-based software to gain more insights into real-time claims status. A third-party team has the resources and bandwidth to provide a much deeper level of data, helping practice leadership identify and address issues promptly to proactively reduce the risk of claim delays and denials.
4. Reporting Capabilities
The ability to measure practice growth and financial success is crucial for strategic planning. If your in-house billing team is too overstretched to provide current billing data, your leadership team will struggle to make informed business decisions on a broader scale. Effective decision-making is only possible when you fully understand your current practice landscape and can monitor concrete metrics for growth.
Outsourced RCM solutions include business intelligence tools that automatically analyze historical trends to forecast future challenges, highlighting potential revenue cycle needs and critical areas for improvement. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs), such as revenue per patient and days in AR, will bring to light the top barriers to practice growth, helping your team effectively allocate resources to seal the major leaks in your revenue cycle.
5. Billing Liability
Achieving billing compliance requires a deep understanding of evolving regulatory requirements and, more importantly, how to avoid financial damage from insurance mistakes and regulatory violations. This is a tall order for a highly experienced, fully staffed billing office — which is unlikely to be found in a dental practice in today’s healthcare climate.
Outsourcing your revenue cycle to a team of seasoned dental RCM professionals ensures complete compliance with all regulatory standards, insurance requirements, and security protocols. With a whole team of experts working to move each claim through the revenue cycle, you can be confident that your cash flow remains safe from costly compliance violations and reimbursement delays or denials.
With practice profitability and patient care at stake, it’s essential to choose the solution that provides the consistency and transparency your revenue cycle demands. Partnering with a team of experienced dental RCM experts like Accurio will equip your practice with every tool necessary to drive long-term growth.
