How to Optimize Your Ambulatory Billing Strategy for Growth

Physician consolidation is on the rise—but that’s nothing new. Between 2016 and 2018 hospitals acquired 8,000 medical practices. During that same period, 14,000 doctors left private practice to join hospitals. And currently, less than half of US physicians own their own practice.

The global pandemic accelerated this trend. In April 2020, over half of primary care practices reported that they may not have enough revenue to continue operating.

If you’re a growing health system or private equity firm interested in expanding your healthcare footprint, now is an opportune time to act. Competition is fierce, so you need a strategy that enables you to move quickly and efficiently.

But acquiring practices may be the easy part of launching or expanding your physician enterprise. The challenging aspect is keeping physicians satisfied while maximizing profitability—and much of that challenge comes down to optimizing your ambulatory billing process.

Tegria can help you rapidly grow your physician enterprise strategy and ensure the revenue cycle process is returning optimal results. Let’s take a look at a few ways we can help.

Unify your enterprise under a single billing system

Physician practices use a wide variety of EHR systems. Migrating them off their current system and onto a new one—not to mention training them to use it—is time-consuming and expensive.

You can reduce costs and increase efficiency by leveraging Tegria’s proprietary revenue cycle management (RCM) platform. The technology integrates seamlessly with any EHR system. Together, we’ll create a single overarching revenue cycle process that covers all of the ambulatory practices you manage—and scales as you grow. Best of all, you can see how your entire enterprise is performing from a singular view, and evolve accordingly.

Streamline the payer contracting and tax ID transition

Absorbing new practices into your existing ambulatory contract strategy can get complicated and messy. You can quickly get bogged down in all of the administrative tasks and hurdles, which takes your resources away from focusing on strategic growth.

By entrusting the payer contracting and tax ID transition to a team with deep healthcare experience, you save yourself time and avoid costly errors. Tegria can seamlessly transition your billing payer by payer to your new contracts and wind down the old tax ID. We’ll handle all the contracting, credentialing, and billing logistics to ensure you’re maximizing the revenue potential of newly integrated practices.

Gain efficiencies by working with ambulatory experts

Internally transitioning from institutional billing to ambulatory billing is a major challenge. That’s because the economics of the two billing systems are very different. Even the most efficient billing operations have difficulty managing balances that are small in comparison to hospital bills while maintaining a margin. Tegria has the technology and experience working in professional billing to ensure you’re always obtaining optimal payouts with the right cost structure.

Our expertise and technology can help you accelerate your expansion, and deliver on your ambulatory revenue cycle management needs. In addition, we offer support services in payer contracting, credentialing, practice management, and technology services—all designed to support your physician enterprise growth plans.