The Smart Rev Cycle Blog

Harvard Business Review Reveals Inefficiency in Healthcare Labor is Killing Independent Practices In the past decade, healthcare costs have skyrocketed. According to a study in Health Affairs, national health spending is currently projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.4% from 2019...

Once you have measured, communicated, and improved on your Revenue Cycle productivity, it is absolutely essential to celebrate that success. Here at White Plume, we have a fundamental value of "Celebrate Success." This is the quote from our employee handbook: "Catching people doing things right...

There is a massive opportunity for productivity improvements in most practices in the mid-revenue cycle, and the ROI for increased productivity for these practices is usually $100k or more per year. Once practices have identified this opportunity, how do they make these productivity improvements?...

When it comes to productivity, communication between practice leaders and Rev Cycle team members is important. Practice executives need to provide direction, clarity, and targets for their team. Being able to communicate about that in the practice is very helpful to your teams and gives them some...

After studying a year's worth of encounter data, we've uncovered several revenue cycle productivity and outcomes trends. This infographic gives a snapshot of what the data uncovered: The average EPH for White Plume clients was 167 in 2020. EPH stands for Encounters per Hour, and it is a key metric...

The Rev Cycle team of the future will include Data Scientists, Business Analysts, Behavioral Coaches, and Software Subject Matter Experts who can leverage the expertise, data, and tools to make billers and coders more productive. This trend is already underway in payer organizations, health systems,...

CMS is making the biggest changes since 1997 to Evaluation and Management Coding. These changes go into effect on January 1, 2021. The 3 biggest changes are: These changes apply to New & Established Office Visits and outpatient codes (99201-99215). 99201, New Patient Visit Level 1 is being...

Do you know how productive your coders are? These practices do, and they are 7.5x more productive than the average coder. For the past 20 years, the big three rev cycle KPIs have been denial rate, charge lag and AR days. These big 3 metrics are good, but they are not complete. Through hard work and...

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard, “I didn’t go to medical school to be a coder!” Correct coding is essential for accurate and complete reimbursement, and at the same time, coding is complicated. Different payers want the same clinical procedure coded differently according to their requirements,...

Innovative practices that add the missing rev cycle KPI of Encounters per Hour to their practice dashboard recognize that a critical part of radically improving coder productivity is a mindset shift for their team. Improved productivity and throughput are in addition to, not in place of coding accuracy....