The Account Receivable Aging Report is the best option for measuring your practices overall financial health of a practice. The ideal report would show that all claims are being paid before 45 days. If a claim hasn’t been paid within the 45-day period it either hasn’t been paid or has been rejected and needs a follow up.

If you have multiple claims over 90-days is an obvious problem for our accounts receivable. Unpaid claims can interfere with insurance companies filing deadlines. That being said, if its just one or two claims you don’t need to be all that worried as there are many variables that factor into this report being completed. A primary example being any appeals that have been made, these claims require more time to resolve depending on the situation but will appear in the report as outstanding.

One of the best tools to use while tracking your 2021 metrics is the Key Performance Indicators or KPI report. This report keeps track of trends in your RCM, positive or negative, this report will show you where your practice is succeeding and where it is failing. Enabling you too either continue what you are doing if its working or alter your CRM if its not. The metrics you want to pay attention too are total encounters, total number of procedures, total charges, total collections, and adjustments. Compare these with national averages from practices with a similar specialty and adjust accordingly.

If your numbers don’t stand up to the national averages of your specialty, its time to investigate your payment and collection policies and procedures. Here are some helpful questions you should be asking:

• Is data collection, reporting and coding as accurate as possible?
• How strict are your window collection policies?
• Do you offer financial counseling for struggling patients?
• Are you pursuing claim denials and adjustments?