Turning Red to Black Blog

If you are a Revenue Cycle Manager, now is the time to plan for tax season.  As we’re all thinking about our Thanksgiving meal and the Christmas Season is bursting with the flavors of egg nog and gingerbread as the happy sounds of carols dance all around us while Santa Claus descends upon every mall in America there is a slow churning that begins to take hold at many companies across the country.  In billing offices everywhere decorations are broken out, parties are planned and names are drawn for secret gift exchanges.  But somewhere in the midst of all this glee, work must continue, so plans are constructed to close the year out strong and find ways to increase revenue for the following year. 

The healthcare industry has seen its share of mergers and acquisitions over the last few years which has affected in large scale the way the medical field looks and conducts business.  Likewise, the changing landscape of the collection industry is producing larger regional and national companies that have survived an industry-wide M&A wave as well as the tightening of rules and regulations by increasing their investments in compliance, infrastructure, technology, analytics, training of staff and process improvement.  As this process continues, smaller, localized “mom and pops,” and even some medium-sized regional agencies, have had trouble competing with these leaner, more diversified operations.  

Some of you may remember the “good ol’ days” when files were kept in file cabinets that contained handwritten records and notes.  When files were hand-delivered to collection agencies by courier and then filed into a queue cabinet and each time a call was made the file would be pulled out of the cabinet and a scribble of a note would be hastily written onto a card to record what occurred during the call. Once complete, it would be refiled to call again or manage as a payment arrangement.

This week saw the completion of our summer webinar series on Revenue Cycle Management. We have included links below to each of the webinars as they are now available on our brand new YouTube channel for on-demand viewing. These videos explore a variety of subjects but concentrate on ideas that have worked for Simon's over the years and which organizations can use to help improve their own revenue cycles each month. We hope you enjoy them and find them useful!

In our last Tipping Point we examined some of the tools we use at Simon’s to do that thing we do best – collect money for our clients. This time around we want to take a closer look at the tools we offer our clients to ensure that their files are placed in an accurate and timely fashion and that they have the ability to track our progress and understand the remittance that they receive.