Most hospitals, whether or not they choose to directly employ physicians or manage hospital-owned medical practices or groups, desire to maintain a productive, mutually beneficial and coordinated relationship with independent but affiliated medical practices whose providers are on-staff at the hospital. And while those practices, being independently owned, are responsible for their own revenue cycle management, a hospital can still take important steps to enhance the affiliated-provider relationship.
Having a revenue cycle management expert engaged by the hospital and made available to assist the independent practices with issues they share in common and that pertain both to revenue cycle opportunities and their underlying relationship with the hospital, is very important and valuable.
The issues addressed can be software-related, especially if some of the practices share a common practice management software system. Or the issues can be more directly revenue-cycle related, including coding, medical billing training, patient balance management, refund processing, centralized collection agency interface, or the establishment of electronic bank lockbox protocols.
It is also helpful to have a third party revenue cycle expert involved in projects such as lab interfaces, interoperability development, data interfaces with hospital systems and the selection of updated software systems.
Precision has knowledge and expertise in all of these areas and has for many years provided comprehensive support to many independent medical practices, spanning many different medical specialties. With that background and expertise, Precision can serve as a strong advocate for optimized revenue cycle management support to IPAs, multi-specialty medical groups and single-specialty independent practices, in coordination with a professionally-directed hospital relationship.
"My pediatric practice, Children's Clinic, has worked closely with Precision for many years in an effective partnership that has contributed greatly to the management of our practice. In order to best serve patients, the "business side" of things must run extremely well. Precision appeals insurance low pays on drugs and provider services, communicates coding updates and specialty-related and billing changes, tracks office collection of copays and patient balances, compares our coding levels to national distributions and identifies our denial and rejection issues, to name just a few. Monthly meetings with Precision allow us to review month end reports, identify opportunities for improvement and constantly "raise the bar" on our performance as a practice. In today's difficult economic environment, Precision is a business partner we can count on."
