RCM Partner Expertise and Excellence: Essential Competencies for Maximizing Revenue and Cash Flow

PART 2: EXPERTISE AND EXCELLENCE

Read Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.

Laboratory and diagnostic leaders look for several important financial factors when evaluating existing—and potential—revenue cycle management (RCM) outsourcing partners, including performance in the areas of:

• Increasing cash flow
• Capturing more revenue
• Reducing expenses
• Accelerating the speed of cash collection
• Boosting return on cash

Although it’s important to understand the results that your current RCM outsourced services partner is delivering for your organization, that’s just a starting point. After all, you’re essentially measuring them against past performance—either theirs, a past partner’s, or your own organization’s unassisted work. For a more complete picture, you need industry data and benchmarks. And as you gather that information, we recommend using five criteria to frame your evaluation. Your outsourced RCM partner must demonstrate these five competencies if they’re going to help you achieve your financial and operational performance goals:

1. Innovation
2. Expertise and Excellence
3. Quality of Service and Value
4. Security, Compliance, and Trustworthiness
5. Reliability

In the first post in this 4-blog series, we evaluated success criteria in the category of Innovation. If you missed that post, you can read it here. In this second post in the series, we’ll be discussing assessment criteria related to Expertise and Excellence.

How does an RCM service provider demonstrate Expertise and Excellence? You can see it when their:

• Teams clearly demonstrate expertise and skill and perform at a high level
• Range of solution offerings covers the needs of their clients and aligns strategically with their mission
• Implemented solutions meet and exceed expected results while benefitting from ongoing development and improvement

Assessing RCM Partner Expertise and Excellence

As mentioned before, one valuable tool laboratories and diagnostic organizations can use to help evaluate Expertise and Excellence is the Black Book Market Research report, Diagnostic/Laboratory/Ancillary Services Revenue Cycle Management: Outsourced & Managed Support RCM Services User Survey. Black Book Research conducts an in-depth study to understand how diagnostic leaders evaluate outsourced RCM service providers across eighteen (18) key performance metrics.

Industry expertise directly informs the solutions an RCM partner offers; if they know where your organization wants to go, then they have crafted their services to help you get there. One of the performance metrics (Question 1, page 10) that can help you evaluate Excellence and Expertise is based on the Black Book Market Research team asking study participants to evaluate RCM outsourced services providers on the following statements related to “Strategic Alignment of Vendor Offerings to Provider Goals & Client’s Mission.”

• Organizational structure meets the needs of stakeholders or customers.
• Stakeholder satisfaction is the most important priority.
• Outsourcing clients are likely to recommend the vendor to similar-sized organizations and types.

For a second performance metric related to Expertise and Excellence (Question 6, page 15), Black Book Market Research asked research participants to assess RCM outsourced services providers on the following statements related to “Breadth of Offerings, Varied Client Settings, Delivery Excellence Across All User Types.”

• Vendors routinely drive operational performance improvements and results in the areas they affect.
• Comprehensive offerings are constructed to meet the unique needs of the client’s clinical and business initiatives.

Finally, the third metric related to Expertise and Excellence (Question 11, page 20) is based on the team at Black Book Market Research asking participants to evaluate RCM outsourced services providers on statements related to “Vendor Staff Expertise, Compensation and Employee Performance.”

• Outsourcing vendor team is considered top in industry for professionalism and skill.
• Vendor attracts and retains high performing staff.
• Vendor is focused on building and developing a strong employee team of producers.
• Employees act like owners/leaders.
• The company is moving towards leveraged pay at all levels.
• Vendor is using effective tools to tie performance metrics to compensation policy and compensating top leaders.

Outsourced RCM services providers that rank high for these performance metrics demonstrate the Expertise and Excellence that laboratories and diagnostic providers need to deliver against their financial and operational goals. They know their business—and, more importantly, yours. They help your organization excel financially in our challenging and constantly changing climate. Better yet, they help influence and shape that climate.

Through objective industry data such as the Black Book Market Research report, backed by the real-world experiences of more than 2,600 survey respondents, laboratories and diagnostic providers can quantitatively evaluate whether they have partnered with the outsourced RCM services provider that can deliver the capabilities needed to help them maximize cash flow, accelerate time to collection, and optimize return on cash.

The next post in this series focuses on the third category of core RCM services capabilities, Quality of Service and Value. Until then, download the full 2023 Black Book Market Research Diagnostic/Laboratory Support and Revenue Cycle Management Outsourcing report to see which outsourced RCM service partners can help you accelerate cash collection and increase profitability.