Ambulatory RCM Services: Letting It Go

Disney's Frozen "Let It Go" Sequence Performed by Idina Menzel

My five-year-old daughter is in love with the movie Frozen. So you can imagine just how often I hear “Let It Go” in my home—especially since she just received as a birthday present a toy microphone that plays the song on repeat (and has surprisingly powerful sound projection).

At KLAS, we just wrapped up data collection and analysis for our upcoming Ambulatory RCM Services Study and, for some reason, “Let It Go” continued to pop up in my mind throughout the process.

For some providers, letting go of their billing and some of their administrative tasks can be a challenge, and these providers expressed some level of frustration with the process. But for the majority, letting go and letting a vendor take care of these tasks is a great thing.

Take a look at the numbers: three out of four organizations interviewed say that their RCM services make them more efficient and that the pricing models are sustainable for the long term. 87% view their RCM services vendor as a trusted business partner, a status not easy for a vendor to achieve, especially when dealing with something as important as a practice’s revenue. But letting go and passing these responsibilities off to vendors has allowed provider organizations to reallocate resources and focus on things that are more important.

For this study (KLAS’ first in this area), we measured the performance of athenahealth, Cerner, eClinicalWorks, Kareo, and NextGen.

What’s your experience with either letting it go or holding on? Do you prefer to outsource your services or keep them in-house?