9 billing numbers your practice should know cold

Ask a practice administrator how the revenue cycle is doing and the answer is almost always a single number: days in accounts receivable. It is a reasonable number. It is also the last one to move. By the time days in A/R climbs, the problem that caused it happened weeks earlier, somewhere upstream, and the metric will not tell you where.

A Jan. 6 MGMA Stat poll asked practice leaders where their revenue cycle leaks the most. Denials and appeals led at 48 percent, followed by front-end issues at 23 percent, billing and collections at 14 percent, coding at 13 percent and charge posting at 2 percent. The poll drew 288 applicable responses. Days in A/R reflects every one of those failure points at once and distinguishes none of them.

The metrics that actually diagnose a revenue cycle are less glamorous and mostly sit unused in reports your practice management system already generates. Here are nine numbers worth knowing cold.