5 ways to jump start your home health cash flow
Many home health agencies struggle to maintain their cash flow these days. But managing your revenue cycle can be downright difficult when you tackle it on your own. Especially in the face of today’s staffing shortages, regulatory changes, and revised Medicare assessments like OASIS-E.
Outsourcing your revenue cycle management (RCM) could be the perfect cure for what ails your cash flow. We’ve been up close and personal with home health agencies and their pain points for more than 25 years. Here are five ways our expert RCM services can help keep you in the black.
1. Simplify performance management
The performance scorecard is a key tool to have in your business arsenal, but it’s important to keep it simple. As you’re defining your key performance indicators (KPIs), start small. Look at a handful of data points on the clinical and financial sides that directly impact your cash flow. We focus on two goals when it comes to data: capturing it and making it actionable, so you’re not left with just numbers and a lot of questions. We make sure the data is well defined and accurately measure so you can act on it.
To simplify process for home health agencies, we look for ways to turn around the coding, OASIS review and requests for anticipated payment (RAP submissions) within five days. We also staff for weekend coding and find creative ways to get orders from physicians to eliminate reimbursement issues. And we’re always looking ahead to keep ourselves and our customers prepared.
2. Submit cleaner claims
The cleaner your claims are, the more predictable your cash flow will be. That’s why we don’t wait around for scrubs to be completed before we check claims for accuracy. We assist with claims edits and even do a scrub of our own. But our biggest commitment? Helping to reduce violations and finding trends that are slowing down your cash flow.
When we find recurring themes around violations, our experts detect the issue and resolve it to make sure it won’t continue to bog down your cash flow. Using automation to its fullest, we check claims for violations within 24 hours and clean them up — saving you the time and effort required to scrub and manage violations on your own.
3. Connect your finance and clinical teams
We understand that your finance team needs to interact with your clinical team for optimal performance. That’s why we offer Stand-Up Calls that connect your finance and clinical teams to facilitate claims processing. It’s a way to physically connect your teams to efficiently resolve claims issues, so you can move forward and get cash in the door.
4. Help prevent claims denials
In the face of ever-changing regulations and staffing shortages, it’s not uncommon for denials to stack up. Individual payors can have their own denials too, along with their own rules and regulations for submitting claims. Denials are confusing, time consuming, and costly. And that’s exactly why outsourcing denial reviews and management makes good financial sense.
We’re familiar with different payers and denials, so we can help you prevent them. We stay on top of new regulations that could affect claim denials, and our team of specialists is dedicated to reviewing denials and handling appeals. It helps save you lots of time so your team can focus on caring for patients.
5. Help eliminate recovery
Unpaid claims over 90 days require too much time, energy and budget to recover. So, when we begin working with a home health agency, our goal is to dig you out and eliminate old claims. That done, we work hard to help eliminate the need for recovery going forward.
We know how aged AR happens —poor intake, not understanding payer contracts, etc. — and can help you build better processes that eliminate the need for recovery.
Expert revenue cycle management
What really sets us apart are the things we see that you might not. Things like ongoing eligibility and authorizations, payor set-up, contract reviews and EHR relationships. We take control of the small stuff so you’re not constantly having to catch up.
We make sure your teams are communicating effectively. All staff should understand the impact of their responsibilities: clinicians should know how they impact billing and billers should know how to work with clinical teams. We focus on communication to keep your agency running smoothly and efficiently.
We understand there’s a lot you can’t control — from staffing shortages to ever-evolving regulation. But when it comes to RCM, we help you accelerate cash flow and protect your bottom line. All so you can focus on what matters most: caring for your patients.
Amber O'Stasik
Amber O’Stasik, RN, BSN
Regional Sales Director
Amber has proudly served as a Registered Nurse since 2004, bringing over 20 years of experience. Her experience in the home health field spans several years, during which she served as a field clinician and later transitioned into sales as a care transitions coordinator. Through these roles, Amber directly encountered the challenges and frustrations that agencies face daily. Amber decided to join MatrixCare because she witnessed their commitment to prioritizing patients over paperwork and their development of comprehensive service offerings to address the issues many agencies encounter.
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