To thrive in today’s complex healthcare landscape, your organization cannot rely solely on internal analytics data. Instead, it should engage in both internal and external benchmarking in healthcare so that it can achieve a holistic view of its strengths and weaknesses.
Explore benchmarking in healthcare, including what it is, the benefits it provides, and how your organization can use it to improve profitability.
Benchmarking in healthcare is the process of evaluating an organization’s financial and operational performance. You will compare your performance to:
Examining how your organization stacks up to each of these benchmarks helps you identify inefficiencies and reduce costs. Patient-centric benchmarking in healthcare improves the care experience and can promote better outcomes.
The key components of benchmarking in the healthcare industry include the following:
Through benchmarking, you can align your financial strategies with industry best practices. The goal is to promote sustainable growth and improved revenue cycle management.
There are several types of benchmarking in the healthcare industry. The most common include the following:
Additionally, you can benchmark payer contracts to identify which payers are underperforming and which are living up to the terms of your agreement. To learn more about contract benchmarking, watch our on-demand webinar Contract Benchmarking: Are You Taking Action?
Take a look at some practical benchmarking in healthcare examples.
Imagine that a multi-location medical practice wants to examine reimbursement rates. By leveraging benchmarking solutions, the practice could identify areas where they were underpaid and successfully renegotiate contracts.
Benchmarking in the healthcare industry is also valuable for reducing claim denials. In this scenario, a health system is struggling with high denial rates. The organization implements functional benchmarking to assess denial trends.
With the help of a claim resolution solution, the health system could streamline its denial management process and recapture lost revenue.
There are several benefits of benchmarking.
Healthcare providers can use benchmarking to identify revenue leakage and inefficiencies in payer contracts. They can use these insights to facilitate better financial planning and optimize their revenue cycles.
Benchmarking also promotes less administrative waste and more efficient revenue capture. For example, using benchmarking to examine claims denial trends helps providers focus on denials with the highest likelihood of being reversed. They can avoid wasting time and resources on low-percentage denials.
Integrating benchmarking data into your contract negotiations can help you obtain better reimbursement rates. You can support your negotiating position with hard data and trends that demonstrate how payers are underperforming. With benchmarking data, you can ensure a fair and competitive compensation agreement from insurance companies.
Benchmarking reduces claims denials and helps you improve your patient payment collection strategies. Through benchmarking, you can also improve billing accuracy and reduce administrative costs.
However, you’ll need the right revenue cycle solutions to act on the insights gleaned from your benchmarking efforts. Revenue Diagnostics from Rivet Health is the premier solution to increase your cash collections and promote financial health.
Learn more about Revenue Diagnostics and how healthcare revenue cycle management solutions can boost your revenue.
The No Surprises Act created a quagmire of new regulatory hurdles for healthcare organizations. In the first 34 months after the NSA was implemented, the CMS reported over 14,000 complaints.
Benchmarking can help you identify and proactively address potential compliance issues before incurring fines. You can also use benchmarking to promote patient pricing and insurance billing transparency.
Healthcare is increasingly a data-driven field. Why not apply those same principles to your financial and operational decision-making?
Benchmarking provides you with actionable insights to improve your operations and financial health. Use this data to proactively solve problems and optimize your revenue cycle.
The challenges you may encounter when implementing benchmarking in healthcare include the following:
However, you can overcome these hurdles by investing in high-quality benchmarking tools and being transparent about your benchmarking initiatives.
The importance of benchmarking cannot be overstated. Here’s how your organization can reap the benefits of benchmarking:
Benchmarking is a recurring process of analyzing data, implementing changes, and adapting.
At Rivet Health, we understand the importance of benchmarking in the healthcare industry. Our revenue diagnostics solutions empowers providers by:
If you’d like to learn more about benchmarking and revenue cycle management in healthcare and how Rivet Health supports your financial health, sign up for an upcoming webinar or watch an on-demand webinar here.
If you are ready to modernize your medical practice’s revenue cycle, schedule a demo with Rivet Health.
