Healthcare revenue cycle management (RCM) plays a key role in the smooth administration of hospitals and other medical settings. Data redundancies and errors that can occur from manual processes can negatively affect claims management, value-based reimbursement, contracts management, denials management, and billing. This drives the need for revenue cycle management (RCM) outsourcing. The latest report from Technavio predicts the healthcare RCM outsourcing market in the U.S. to grow at a CAGR of around 13% during 2018-2022. Just like medical billing outsourcing, outsourcing RCM tasks to an experienced company can lead to improvement in the healthcare administrative processes, optimization, and operational efficiency.
The key factors that contribute to the growth of this market are the improvement in healthcare administrative processes, optimization, and operational efficiency. Other notable trends include:
- increasing consolidation in the market
- rise in the adoption of cloud computing
During 2017, the healthcare industry in the US witnessed an increase in the number of mergers and acquisitions. Factors such as inorganic growth, improved margins, productivity, scale, and increased portfolio of product offerings encouraged several high-profile mergers and acquisitions.
Based on the types of service, the market is segmented into Back-end, Middle and Front-end services. The front-end services segment includes the pre-intervention activities such as insurance cover, patient admission, insurance eligibility verification, and medical appointment scheduling.
As per the Technavio report, the medical billing outsourcing market in the US is witnessing growth in the front-end services segment due to the fact that accuracy of patient data determines an efficient delivery of reimbursement or the full and final financial settlement.
This research report also provides an analysis of various companies in the medical billing outsourcing market including Allscripts, Change Healthcare, Conifer Health Solutions, MEDNAX Services and nThrive.
Loss of Revenue Due to Billing Errors, a Factor Driving RCM Market Growth
According to another report from Research and Markets, the loss of revenue due to billing errors is a factor driving the growth of the revenue cycle management market. Other factors include decreasing reimbursements in the healthcare industry, regulatory mandates for the adoption of electronic health and medical records, government initiatives to boost the adoption of RCM solutions, and process improvements in healthcare organizations. This report predicts the market to reach USD 90.43 billion by 2022 from USD 51.07 billion in 2017, at a CAGR of 12.1%.
However, the major factors restraining the growth of this market include the high pricing and costly maintenance of RCM solutions, scarcity of skilled IT professionals, and IT infrastructural constraints in developing markets. The end users of the market are physicians, hospitals, and laboratories among others, of which the physicians segment is projected to register the highest growth rate during the forecast period 2017-2022.
To learn more about the healthcare revenue cycle management trends in 2018, read our blog, What Are the Key Healthcare Revenue Cycle Management Trends to Watch in 2018?
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Global Revenue Cycle Management Market to Grow at a CAGR of 12.1% by 2022
Rajeev Rajagopal, the President of OSI, has a wealth of experience as a healthcare business consultant in the United States. He has a keen understanding of current medical billing and coding standards.