Hospitals Maneuver Financial Operations to Adopt Full Scale Outsourcing, 1 in 6 Hospitals Lift and Shift RCM to External Suppliers by 2015, Reveals Black Book Study
Clearwater, FL (PRWEB) October 28, 2013 -- In a series of eight research reports on the 2013 State of the Revenue Cycle Management industry, Black Book™ releases comprehensive findings of IT and services users on the trends and directions of hospitals and physician practices. The top ranked vendors in customer satisfaction and client experience among outsourced RCM are announced after a sweeping six month poll.
The "Top Revenue Cycle Management Outsourcing Vendors" a four part report set provides analysis on the rapidly evolving RCM outsourcing environment as organizations upgrade patient billing and collection processes through the help of top performing service vendors.
According to Black Book Rankings, the hospital RCM outsourcing industry could reach at $4.5 billion in services revenues by 2017. As hospitals and physician practices flock to outsourcing vendors to better deal with business shifts encountered from reimbursement and payment reforms, accountable care participation, ICD-10 coding challenges, problem collections, and declining margins, RCM outsourcing - particularly domestic RCM outsourcing - gears up for meteoric growth.
The top outsourcing vendor performances were polled of 3,094 facility RCM leaders and management users, patient accounting and IT support management from 406 hospitals, as well as 587 Business Office Managers from physician groups, clinics and IPAs. 141 RCM outsourcing solution suppliers specializing in end-to-end RCM, as well as boutique or niche RCM services were identified by clients on 18 key performance indicators across four grouped areas of RCM functionality: Coding, Billing and Managed Care Contracting; Claims Management, Denial Management and Payment Compliance; Resolutions, Receivables, Collections and Bad Debt; and Patient Access Services.
Conifer Health Solutions ranked highest in outsourced client experience among US Hospitals over 150 beds.
McKesson RelayHealth topped the outsourced RCM rankings in US Hospitals under 150 Beds.
Other outsourcing vendors with next best performance scores in the individual inpatient facilities include alphabetically: Accretive Health, Apollo Health Street, BancTec, CCS Revenue Cycle, Cerner, Culbert Healthcare, Cymetrix, Deloitte, Emdeon, Experian Healthcare, FirstSource, GeBBs, HGS, MedAssets, NCO Group, Optum, Parallon, The Outsource Group, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Pyramid Health Solutions, The ROI Companies, and Xerox.
Parallon and recently acquired The Outsource Group, collectively scored highest for outsourced RCM client satisfaction among hospital chains, systems, IDNs, CINs and accountable care organizations. Conifer Health Solutions and McKesson RelayHealth also ranked among the top three suppliers to inpatient facility networks,.
Ambulatory physician groups and clinics honored Allscripts for most impressive outcomes in RCM services on a contracted partnership arrangement.
Top Findings in the 2013 Black Book Outsourced Revenue Cycle Management report include:
Hospitals over 150 beds utilizing outsourced RCM solutions, on average, report a increase of 4.9% increase in net revenue after implementing external service vendors more than one year. Average operating margins increased by 6.6% after outsourcing RCM according to participating CFOs.
Chief Financial Officers in smaller and rural hospitals under 150 beds experienced an average 6.7% increase in net revenue after outsourcing RCM, and 7.0% improvement in operating margins.
"As hospitals continue to struggle with declining reimbursement rates and increasing self-pay populations, comprehensive outsourcing of revenue cycle management services will help hospitals confront the disruptions associated with the uncertainties", said Doug Brown, Managing Partner of Black Book Market Research LLC, and the co-author of the worldwide bestselling "The Black Book of Outsourcing" (Wiley Publishers). "Hospital outsourcing partners are delivering the benefits of process standardization, technology, scale, staffing and next generation RCM expertise very efficiently."
Despite the additional possible savings from offshoring the back office RCM functions, 80% of hospital financial leaders favor localized workforces over vendors with Indian support staffs. "Offshore business process outsourcing has gained much greater acceptance in most all other industries with cost savings and process quality improvements except healthcare delivery. The hospital and medical business communities, but especially healthcare consumers are strong advocates of locally sourced employment for outsourced work and are willing to bypass greater ROIs to maintain higher approval ratings from patients.
In a 2012 Black Book collection services satisfaction survey, 78% of patients reported a more favorable patient/hospital collections experience from customer interactions attributed to a US-based outsourcing provider. 17% of best patient collections experiences were sourced to in-house (non-outsourced) patient financial services representatives, but only 2% found the offshore collections as the most customer-satisfying patient collections experience.
"More than 85% of Black Book survey patient respondents that rated their billing and collections experience among the highest in satisfaction, also rated their clinical care and medical related services as highest," noted Brown. "Top ranked RCM vendors have proven track records for increasing the overall positive perceptions in patient satisfaction for stressed facilities."
About Black Book™
Black Book Rankings, a division of Black Book Market Research LLC, provides healthcare IT users, media, investors, analysts, quality minded vendors, and prospective software system buyers, pharmaceutical manufacturers, and other interested sectors of the clinical technology industry with comprehensive comparison data of the industry's top respected and competitively performing technology vendors.
The largest user opinion poll of its kind in healthcare IT, Black Book™ collects over 400,000 viewpoints on information technology and outsourced services vendor performance annually. For methodology, auditing, resources, comprehensive research and ranking data, see http://www.blackbookrankings.com.
Douglas Brown, Black Book, a division of Brown-Wilson Group, http://www.brown-wilson.com, +1 (727) 463-7806, [email protected]
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