If your revenue cycle management operations seem to be slowing down, they likely are. Many medical billing professionals were sent home during the COVID-19 pandemic. With an aging workforce, many of these mission-critical experts chose to stay home or retire. As a result, staffing gaps continue to widen and are difficult to fill.
Even when your practice, hospital, ambulatory surgery center or healthcare system is growing, your in-house RCM team may still struggle to keep up. Many leaders report that maintaining full staffing is now one of the hardest operational challenges.
A 2024 MGMA Stat shows the depth of the problem. While clinician shortages receive more public attention, a full third of medical groups surveyed say hiring and keeping experienced RCM staff remains difficult, time-consuming and expensive. A report from the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA), details similar concerns. The association states that the healthcare industry is in “serious condition” due to affordability pressures and capacity shortages. These factors increase financial risk for providers, contribute to higher patient bad debt and make collections more difficult.
The Roles Most Impacted by Staffing Shortages
Healthcare leaders also report that skilled medical coders are the hardest roles to fill. This shortage is followed closely by billers, schedulers, prior authorization specialists and teams responsible for denials, claims and collections. These functions are intertwined, so even one vacancy can disrupt the entire workflow.
It’s only expected to get worse. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) estimates roughly 12,300 new medical records specialist roles will be created between 2021 and 2031, an increase of about 7 percent from 2021 levels. Demand continues to grow faster than available talent.
The Way Ahead
So how do you cope — let alone optimize — your RCM operations, with a small bench of RCM experts, growing burnout, the complexities of ever-evolving regulations and rising staffing costs?
Many are turning to outsourced RCM operations to maintain performance and reduce risk.
RCM partners such as Advantum Health focus exclusively on the complex mix of revenue cycle services. This means organizations gain access to a deeper bench of experts who specialize in medical billing, coding, prior authorizations, denials and collections rather than staff who split time with clinical duties.
How Advantum Health Supports RCM Stability and Growth
Advantum Health has partnered with hundreds of healthcare organizations across specialties and sizes for decades. Our teams combine best practices with a broad group of experienced professionals supported by a customized AI-based technology suite, Advantum Ai™.
This platform integrates with a client’s practice management system and electronic health record as a unified ecosystem. Advantum Ai creates real-time visibility, predictive analytics and insights into both current performance and future trends. As the system continues to learn, it helps optimize workflows and streamline the RCM process.
Our expert team, supported by Advantum Ai, have a proven track record of delivering clean claims, preventing undercharging, reducing missed pre-authorizations, decreasing denials and improving accounts receivable follow-up for outstanding patient balances.
A Path Toward Stronger RCM Outcomes
From large, multi-site provider organizations to smaller practices, Advantum Health has many proven partner success stories to share. Let us talk about your challenges, our solutions and how we can help.