Outsourcing is Not a Sign of Defeat
- FTE's and the Budget
- What are your employee resources?
- The need for focus
As budget time rolls around, we all must think of the major barriers to meeting our budget goals.
Salaries and employee benefits are always a major consideration in budget planning. Every organization is squeezed to the max to reduce these costs and to, when possible, downsize.
FTE restraints are always a detriment to providing a thorough work effort. We all live with these restraints and how we cope with them can mean the success or failure of our operation.
Of course, affording the FTEs is only a part of the problem. Finding trainable, motivated, willing-to-work employees in rural America is one of the most difficult tasks we face. Young people head for the metropolitan areas seeking better jobs and pay than is often not available back home.
These two problems cause us to make some drastic decisions. It is important to live within our means and to make the best possible use of the workforce that is available to us.
The decision that can make or break you is how to focus your work efforts in a way that will be the most financially productive. Try to get past the idea that outsourcing some of the work effort in your business office is a sign of weakness or inability to measure up. Know well, that cash flow and revenue recovery can be optimized by working smart.
Your insurance receivables are your best source of instant money. Medicare and most commercial insurance plans pay fairly rapidly if they are billed properly and followed up on systematically. Getting the bill out the door is the single most important issue for prompt payment. Many hospitals do not focus on this urgency as much as they should. Meeting timely filing deadlines should be highly emphasized. Timely follow up to ensure that claims have been received and are in the process of being paid is more important today than ever before. There are carriers who wait to see what your follow up effort will be in order to dictate how promptly they will pay you.
Hospitals that staff for aggressive efforts in this area can increase their cash flow and reduce their days in receivables drastically.
So, the focus with a limited staff, is to put everyone to work getting the bill out the door and the word to the insurance carriers that they need to pay you promptly to avoid your displeasure at being paid on a delayed basis.
The work effort that is still necessary to ensure good recovery of your outstanding receivables is the collection of the "Due From Patient" portions.
The recovery of these receivables is not as instantaneous as those due from insurance carriers. Proper billing must be done. Patients must work the payment of their amount owed into their budget. Keeping after the patients to fulfill their obligation is a very time consuming job. Long term payment arrangements may have to be made and administered. The man hours necessary to do this properly would be what ruins the best plans of a business office manager who would be trying to manage the full scope of receivables.
Get over the feelings of inadequacy if you can't do it all from within. Outsourcing can be your most reasonable and econonomically feasible way of doing things.
Back to the Receivables Talk Index