I checked Google Trends for the term “Revenue Cycle”, these are some of the related terms I found: revenue management, revenue cycle management, revenue cycle healthcare, accounting cycle.   At number 5 was: what is revenue cycle.

In medical practice management, we throw the term around all day, but have you ever really thought about it?  The first word, revenue, is very self-explanatory and the “dominant” of the pair.  We are very focused on the $, the money, coinage, dough, bread, moola.

How about the second word, cycle?  It’s much less dramatic, gets less attention but as you will learn, the real driving action that gets us the $. 

 I looked up the definition of “cycle”.  Cycle when used as a generic noun can be defined as:

Any complete round or series of occurrences that repeats or is repeated.

In applying to the medical practice, I get it.  Patient comes in, services rendered, services billed, payment collected, as so it goes, over and over.

Then I noticed the definitions that are applied to physics:

a sequence of changing states that, upon completion, produces a final state identical to the original one.

one of a succession of periodically recurring events.

a complete alteration in which a phenomenon attains a maximum and minimum value, returning to a final value equal to the original one.

I particularly like 1 and 3.  I think they bring home a good point to the stages of the cycle.  The “alteration” of the patient account from $0 balance to the full fee for service (representing payer responsibility), reduced balance due (representing patient responsibility) then back down to $0.

When cycle is used as a verb, it can be defined as:

To move or revolve in cycles; pass through cycles.

I would like to think of the cycle in revenue cycle as a hybrid of the noun and the verb. You have both the repetitive alteration of value as an account moves in its cycle. In visualizing the cycle as a moving object, we can understand how speed plays a very important role.

 

Shavara, Inc wants to be your partner in speeding up your revenue cycle. Go to www.iridiumsuite.com to learn more or get a free demo of Iridium Suite practice management system. 

You can also find the next installments of our medical billing blog, A Better Analysis of the Revenue Cycle.  

In it we will:

go through the office workflow processes that have the most significant effects on the speed of your revenue cycle, both the positive and the negative

provide ways to analyze your current efficiency

suggest strategies for improvement.