How many factors impacting your physical therapy revenue cycle are within your control? Maybe more than you think. Developing systems and policies, putting these in place and training your staff for compliance, all will help improve the efficiency of your physical therapy revenue cycle and bring more dollars through your door.

Why is this important? If your heart is in patient care, developing a thriving business allows you to care for more patients for a longer period of time. In other words, if you can’t keep the doors open, you can no longer help your patients. This is why revenue cycle management (RCM) is key for physical therapy offices and outpatient rehabilitation providers.

Efficient RCM is more important now than ever. Patients are increasingly using high-deductible health plans and thus footing the bill for more of their care than ever before. Patient education and emphasizing the importance of the patient’s responsibility for payment of their care will certainly impact the bottom line of your business.

This, however, isn’t the only factor. There are several factors that can impact your revenue cycle. RCM begins at the time the patient first makes contact with your practice, and ends when their bill is paid in full. Therefore, filling in the gaps of all of the in-betweens will help to improve the efficiency of your RCM and help keep money from slipping through your fingers — so to speak.

Here are 8 factors impacting your physical therapy revenue cycle:

• Accuracy and completeness of patient information
• Staff training
• Clinical documentation
• Proper/improper coding
• Patient cooperation & financial responsibility
• Timely and accurate billing
• Clean claims
• Collections

[ Related Article: Tips To Improve Patient Collections ]

The goal of any revenue cycle is to help increase practice revenue, speed up your business’ cash flow and reduce claim errors and costs associated with managing claims.

At Contact Billing, we audit claims and validate ICD-10 and CPT codes in preparation for submission to help eliminate errors. Catching errors early on will prevent them from becoming costlier errors later on in the revenue cycle.

Partnering with a physical therapy billing service or outpatient rehabilitation billing company can help to tighten up your revenue cycle, keep things running smoothly and help you care for more patients for many years to come. To get started, contact us today.