The fact that the healthcare industry has struggled to keep up with patient demand since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic is common knowledge. However, what may surprise some is the ongoing challenges of managing the revenue cycle for healthcare organizations.

Bobby Brill, podcast host of Streamline Health eValuator™, spoke with Jodi Stewart, SVP of Client Success at Streamline Health, and Dhaval Chaudhari, CPA, VP of Finance at MarketScale, about the challenges of the healthcare revenue cycle and what can be done to improve processes and outcomes.

The healthcare industry struggles in dealing with staffing shortages; one area of the revenue cycle that regularly struggles is in the coding department. Stewart explained that healthcare coders are responsible for taking medical record documentation and assigning the appropriate codes for patient care received. The coding paperwork then goes to insurance providers for payment. When there are shortages in coders, organizations can’t ensure accurate and timely processing of paperwork to collect payment for services rendered.

So, how do organizations move to a proactive approach to optimizing coding issues? “Being able to use your resources where they are not processing transactions but they are managing the process. And what do I mean by that? Assume you get a number of transactions that need to be coded into the system, you have an individual that is constantly doing that. If there’s a way to automate that… [then] you’re being proactive in looking at exceptions rather than processing transactions, it’s really owning that process,” Chaudhari explained.

And Stewart agreed, “leveraging technology to assess future risk is certainly necessary in today’s environment. Whether that’s artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing – all of those things can be very valuable when it comes to medical coding.”

Visit Streamline Health to learn more about how they can help automate coding and improve revenue cycle management processes.