Enhancing Revenue Cycle CRM Through Strategic Content

If you’re a leader in the healthcare revenue cycle space, you’re likely missing out on simple opportunities to educate healthcare organizations on your products and services and establish trust within your market.

As much as the rev cycle process is about financials and codes, much of what trips it up is a lack of communication, poor understanding, and a failure to connect with clients, and the healthcare community overall before the talk of money and coding even starts.

Remember, communication doesn’t only happen at the patient level.

I spent years working in revenue cycle consulting and by far, the most monetarily successful relationships I had were with managed care executives and insurance reps who understood my position, my knowledge, and my purpose for contacting them from the very beginning. After that, getting them to clean up years of expired contracts and process 1000 incorrectly denied claims was a much more simple task.

Here are three areas in which knowledgeable, well-crafted content can benefit not only you as a professional, but also smooth relations with your provider-clients.

(Check out  what Inc. has to say about the importance of a serious and strategic approach to content marketing here.)

Increasing Leader Profiles

To get straight to the point, you’re probably missing some serious opportunity online. The Internet (LinkedIn specifically) has a wealth of potential and a drought of active voices in the healthcare space. Revenue cycle impacts facilities on levels ranging from financial to tech and the information in the online space has plenty of room to grow.

The term “thought leader” has been beaten to death, but in spaces like healthcare that move slowly, the actual concept…someone with deep and meaningful insight into a field…still carries weight. This is especially true in the era of ACOs, patient-centered care, and EHRs that can do more than ever.

Client Communications

You send reports, you answer questions, but how many people in your facilities and offices know what you really do? Does the billing manager understand that you’re there to do more than make their lives difficult?

Too often, the revenue cycle process comes at unwelcome times and in ways that employees feel is intrusive to their daily work. As much as boosting margins and finding leakage makes a CFO happy, does the organization like you? Do they really know who you are? Do they trust you?

You can establish all those points by communicating with them in ways that help them help you. If you can send them weekly newsletters or email updates on how to do things like shave time off appeals processes, or code claims so they’re rejected less often, you’ll become a trusted and indispensible ally in their day-to-day work.

Something like a short and informative bulletin targeted toward leadership will keep you on their minds and in touch, so that when you do present results, they’re reading from a positive place. You can even tease new products and services you can offer their organization.

Attracting New Business

Relationships in healthcare are formed slowly and frequently via word-of-mouth, or as offshoots of long-standing connections. Through strategic content though, you have opportunity to make slow, but steady inroads into new areas, and also to showcase your expertise and insight, as well as sample your service offerings in an online space.

White papers, case studies, industry insights, and team knowledge can all be featured on websites, in newsletters, and shared on social platforms. While this is a longer-term strategy, it’s a simple way to boost your sales funnel in passive ways that many of your competitors aren’t yet engaging in.

Too often, the term “content” is only used to refer to blogs and social media shares. In the healthcare space, especially rev cycle, it’s time to rethink that, and start looking at content as a part of a 360 degree communication continuum that runs parallel to all your organizational goals.