Image Credit: Darko Stojanovic from Pixabay.

Running a hospital can be one of the more stressful jobs to have. Alongside making sure that medical facilities and services are up to par, you have to carefully balance your accounts. Though a hospital provides an essential service, it also needs to make money.

That’s where there could be difficulties. How do you make money out of an essential service? Is there a way for hospitals to increase their revenue? If you’re in healthcare management, then these are the types of questions that you might have.

Thankfully, increasing revenue shouldn’t be too difficult. While it’ll require careful balancing and a significant amount of effort, it can be done. That should be without reducing the quality of care that your medical professionals provide.

How To Increase Revenue In A Medical Facility

Have The Right Tools

Regardless of what strategies you put in play, you’ll need to have the right tools to implement and analyze them. While a lot of this depends on your personal preferences, there’s a significant amount of software that you can consider.

A customer relationship management platform, auditing software, and more are just the basics. You’ll also need to consider what the revenue cycle management system for you might actually look like.

Taking advantage of this will help you identify areas of improvement, alongside letting you keep better track of your profit and loss accounts, among others. These will not only cut down on the amount of time it takes to perform tasks but also provides other benefits.

These include cost reduction and increased productivity.

Use Your Extenders

If you’re running a smaller facility, then you should use your extenders as much as possible. That’s typically seen with nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants. These can often take care of many smaller emergencies, which frees up more senior medical staff for other treatments.

Taking this approach means freeing up resources to deal with more patients. The domino effect of this will be an increase in revenue-per-hour. The more responsibilities that people can take on, the better. You shouldn’t overload them, however, as this could have an impact on medical care.

Optimize Your Appointment Schedule

While many patients will be emergency walk-ins, quite a few of them will be by appointment. How these are scheduled out can have a drastic impact on your revenue. Though you’ll need to give medical professionals enough time to diagnose and treat patients, you can still optimize this timeline.

Optimizing your appointment schedule can help with this. By fitting more people into your appointment times, you can increase the number of billable tasks your medical professionals perform. As a result, there’ll be an increase in revenues.

You should make sure to allow for emergencies and other factors, however.

Renegotiate Payer Contracts

The number of medical facilities that don’t renegotiate their payer contracts can be surprising. That’s because they might not know that they can do so. They can, however, though you’ll need to make sure that your patients receive high-quality, cost-effective treatment.

Armed with this, you can come back to payers and renegotiate terms. While this will take time to do, it could be well worth it. You’ll need to make sure that your medical service is of a high enough standard, though.

That’s because you’ll need to use this service as a negotiating tool to get better rates for your hospital.

Improve Your Collection Strategy

While much of a hospital’s revenue will come from insurance companies, a significant portion comes from the patients themselves. That doesn’t mean that all of the due payments are actually paid, however.

You could find that a large percentage of payments that are owed aren’t coming in, resulting in you needing to follow up. Doing so often takes time and effort, which costs money. Instead, you could refine your collections strategy to make it much easier for patients to pay their medical costs.

Streamlining the process speeds things up while also boosting your collections rates. You could also consider hiring a collections agency to do this for you. While you naturally have to pay for this, the boost in incoming revenue will more than cover for this.

Wrapping Up

Running a hospital is never easy. With how essential the service is, you’ll need to make sure that everything is funded to an appropriate level. You also need to keep money coming in while covering all of the medical center’s expenses.

Keeping all of the above in mind should make that easier. By increasing your revenue, you can improve your facilities, alongside providing better and more specialized care. As a result, everybody benefits. Who wouldn’t want that?