How to Enhance Urgent Care Revenue in 2022 and Beyond?

Coming to terms with the rise in demand, Urgent Care owners are well aware of the costs of the business they have signed up for. There are numerous aspects to look at, including facility rent, energy systems, hiring resources, marketing, and such. And with the fast-changing market trends, it has now become imperative for Urgent Care leaders to set out strategies that could help them lead their business in a much more profitable way.

Let us look at the 7 key ways that can help Urgent Care owners maintain positive cash flow, meet business requirements, and enhance the Urgent Care revenue in the upcoming years.

1. Streamline and enhance the efficiency of the Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)

One of the essential keys to a profitable Urgent Care business is to streamline the RCM process.  That means the entire process for attaining clean claims and insurance coverage. Starting from patient registration to reimbursement, the process flow must be carefully strategized to ensure effective revenue streams. But to our advantage, the emergence of digitized solutions has brought in effective answers to all issues that prevailed in managing systems.

For healthcare sectors to improve their RCM workflow, one must incorporate technological advancements that could help align the RCM workflow in such a way that it helps bring in both profit and productivity.

Technology is both a bane and a boon. Having said that, it is also important for RCM leaders and healthcare employees to understand that certain manual operations cannot be replaced. In such a case, they must focus on recruiting the best resource who would fit well to the given job description. After hiring, providing proper and relevant training must be done to help maintain the workflow’s pace effectively.

Outsourcing and offshoring are other two ways of streamlining the healthcare’s RCM process so that an efficient personnel or expert can work on managing the claims and reimbursements while practices can focus on improving patient care and engagement.

2. Leverage the right technology to improve patients per hour

It is a known fact that manpower shortage is the biggest challenge that healthcare and revenue cycle managers are facing currently. But for improving patient inflow and retention rates, healthcare practices must leverage what’s best for them.

The profitability of a practice depends on the number of incoming patients regularly. Increasing manpower might do the job, but it puts a lot of pressure on the practice in terms of spending and managing and the output of the efforts might not turn out positively.

Leveraging the right and unique technology that fits well into the specific practice needs will not only improve efficiency but the quality of how the services are rendered. Incorporating effective Practice Management and EHR software will speed up aspects of the RCM processing and improve the quality of the practice services.

For Urgent Care Services, it is inevitable to use an effective software. Implementation of EMR and other software solutions that best fit the needs of Urgent Care would only benefit their productivity and profitability.

AdvancedMD is a Practice Management Software that adapts itself to unique practice needs. It helps to speed up several RCM processes, enabling practices to stay on top of business operations.

3. Bring in new patients

During the pandemic outbreak, Urgent Care facilities were flooded with new patients. But that was a necessity. Off the rail, one must think about several aspects before reaching out to Urgent Care facilities. These aspects may include the kind of services offered, tests, chance of contagions, frequency of patients, the service quality, reviews, and much more.

Now that people are slowly getting back to normalcy, Urgent Care Centers must bring in the opportunity to bring in new patients and retain the ones that came in high volume during the pandemic.

Communication is the key. Maintain contact with the patients at regular intervals and let them know about the practice’s offerings, additional specialties, check-ups, and upgrades that could benefit them. Emphasize on why they should go back. This can also be applied to potential patient profiles for new accounts.

How to communicate? Practices can effectively use email and message campaigns to achieve their communication strategy to target old and new patients.

4. Enhance patient engagement

Investing time and energy in building a consistent environment for patient engagement will not only satisfy the patient’s expectations but also retain them for a longer period. It is important to incorporate the art of patient persuasion in the Urgent Care Facilities to ensure improved revenue streams.

How to improve patient engagement? Make things easy for them. You might be providing the best treatment facility with proficient practitioners but without making patients’ lives easier while they visit an Urgent Care, they might not consider coming back.

Let’s take, for instance, if the patient registration process takes up a lot of time and energy for the patients, they might get frustrated and in some cases even storm off. But Urgent Care facilities can rectify this very issue by facilitating online patient registration portals that make it seamless and time-effective for them.

So, the means of patient engagement must be clear as a crystal so that patients don’t experience any lack of motivation during their engagement.

A few other ways of improving patient engagement are to deliver flexible platforms to fix and cancel appointments. This way they feel empowered about their encounters and reduce the number of no-shows from the Urgent Care’s point of view.

5. Proper staffing

Although shortage in manpower is prevailing strongly for a long time now, there are Urgent Care Centers that face revenue leakages due to overstaffing. It has a detrimental effect on the healthcare revenue that also leads to under productivity.

To make sure that this doesn’t happen, Urgent Care Practice Managers must thoroughly acknowledge and identify the seasonal market trends every year. Make an estimation chart of patient visits expected in the particular year, apply the analytics and trend requisites, and hire resources in accord with it.

It is also important to analyze the existing staff and eliminate the ones who don’t fit well into any role within the urgent care. Look into the workability of the existing staff as well to understand how long an employee is available to pinch in and allocate roles accordingly.

6. Bring in strategies for enhanced business growth

Increasing Urgent Care revenue isn’t a goal, but rather a journey. Even if the clinic has been well established, it is imperative to add features, scopes, service lines, and strategies that could help maintain as well as enhance the revenue stream significantly.

But before getting into introducing newer strategies and service lines, Urgent Care Centers must identify touch points that will most help the communities that they serve. Competition, business relevance, specialty services, patient demographics, and such are also factors that affect the service lines.

Providing Occupational Medicine, Telehealth, Allergy testing facilities, physical therapy, dermatology, and behavioral healthcare within the Urgent Care Clinic helps to maintain the on-demand healthcare needs and will help in increasing the overall revenue.

7. Streamline the Urgent Care marketing strategy

The modern search behaviors are ever-changing. It has become even more challenging for industries to align with the ongoing digital marketing strategies. To attain an efficient online presence, Urgent Care Centers must strictly follow proper marketing strategies.

Ensuring that the Urgent Care facility’s website ranks on top for search results is the very first concern for strategizing effective marketing. Proper usage of keywords after rigorous research that satisfies Google for SEO optimization is a must.

Write numerous articles including blogs, whitepapers, newsletters, and case studies, to denote the ongoing Urgent Care trends and success stories. Make sure that the marketing employee has enough knowledge to bring in an effective SEO strategy.

Communicate with your patients regularly and allow them to express their opinions and experiences through reviews and survey answers. Allow them to even raise concerns and rectify them on the go. Post the positive reviews or allocate online review platforms to reassure the online presence of Urgent Care along with the proof of the efficiency of service delivery, attained from the accumulation of positive reviews.

Other than organic traffic growth, Urgent Care facilities can invest in paid ads to enhance the ranking of their website’s search appearances. This allows them to stay on top in a geographic range and lets them understand how marketing works.

Urgent Care Services can improve their chances of local search appearance by frequently updating their Google My Business Page. This way, when someone in a specific geographical range looks up “Urgent Care facilities nearby”, they can appear on top.

Any queries? Our experts are all ears! Reach out to our experts to learn more.

ALSO READ – 5 Qualities that a Front Office Staff must Possess in an Urgent Care Facility