The top two challenges in healthcare institutions’ cash flow include awaiting patients to pay from their pockets and waiting for the insurance payers. Filing a claim and waiting for insurance companies to pay is a serious challenge. Claim denials are primarily linked to human error that may be experienced because of wrong patient information or incorrect billing data. About 84% of health care leaders in a survey indicated that incorrect coding causes considerable revenue loss (“Top Cash Flow Challenges in Health Care (and What Clinics Can Do about Them),” 2020). These challenges can be curbed by appointing an internal team mandated with examining the claims, developing checklists that ensure reimbursement and billing accuracy, and assigning a different team to investigate claim denials.
Patient self-payment establishes cash flow challenges as some cannot afford to pay the bills. Hospitals and other health institutions are forced to waste resources and revenue to facilitate collecting payment from the patients. Health personnel must be transparent to the patients to improve patients’ compliance with paying the bills ((“Top Cash Flow Challenges in Health Care (and What Clinics Can Do about Them),” 2020). Before patients enter the healthcare setting, they should be aware of facts and figures to avert the surprise encountered when the invoice arrives in their mail. The health personnel must also practice billing that is friendly to the patient. The bills should indicate what the patient is paying for to avoid or reduce any questions from the patient. Health institutions should also provide digital payment options for their patients to encourage them to pay on time through their mobile devices. Check payments need to be digitized as the manual tasks to process the checks take longer. Remote Deposit Capture (RDC) scans and extracts data from check images, and it directly deposits in the accounts; thus, it may serve as an essential tool to reduce the cash flow challenges.
References
Top cash flow challenges in health care (and what clinics can do about them). (2020). Minnwest Bank. Web.