How to maximize cash flow and minimize manual tasks
How much of your team’s workflow involves manual tasks? Are you constantly running into issues like denied claims, scheduling conflicts or coding mistakes on patient forms?
These are just a few of the things that slow down your team. From verifying patient eligibility to coding treatment information to creating schedules and setting company-wide performance indicators, operating manually doesn’t allow much room for growth. It increases the risk of making mistakes and splits your staff’s focus. However, supporting your staff with tech-savvy tools can help them work faster and smarter to create better results.
The following is a closer look at the impact of manual tasks and how switching to an automated workflow can benefit your bottom line.
Understanding the impact of manual tasks
Consider all the manual tasks involved in your revenue cycle alone. If your team creates claims on paper, sends them out via standard mail, then repeats this process when claims are denied, you’re missing out on a substantial amount of money that could be appearing on the books much faster.
When you also consider verifying patient eligibility for every appointment on your schedule, emailing shifts to staff each week and/or processing patient payments by hand, the impact of manual tasks becomes much more apparent.
Manual tasks delay your operations. They increase the likelihood of making mistakes, which then causes staff members to repeat tasks they’ve already done. Working manually also provides little visibility to your organization as a whole; it’s much harder to track things like employee engagement or patient satisfaction if you don’t have the means to gather and make sense of relevant data.
The pitfalls of manual tasks outweigh the benefits. An automated workflow allows your staff to focus on what they do best whether they’re a biller, nurse, physician or caretaker while giving you the peace of mind that your organization is operating efficiently.
Moving from manual to automated work
Creating an automated workflow doesn’t happen overnight. There’s a lot of thought that goes into choosing the right systems to implement, as well as identifying which manual tasks you’d like to phase out.
Maybe it’s time to implement a staff scheduling software rather than relying on email to assign and change shifts. Maybe you need to establish a better way to track the rate of patient falls in your nursing home or infection occurrences in your hospital.
You can also explore the option of using a claims management system that can store and retrieve patient history at the click of a button. Or, try sending online claims out in batches versus one by one. Consider how you set and achieve organizational goals, too.
When you’re ready to set automated workflows in motion, focus on getting the most ROI possible. Think of your investment in terms of time as well as money. While your bottom line will benefit from the value of automated systems and tech-savvy tools, you also need to make the most of your staff’s time.
The synergy between the two will create the healthy cash flow you’re looking for. As your staff starts to put their talent into more effective tasks, your patient satisfaction will also increase. These efficiencies will lead to revenue growth both in terms of how much you’re able to bill and how quickly claims hit your books
