Healthcare needs are unpredictable, making accurate revenue calculation challenging for hospitals and other healthcare organizations. Other industries can build recurring clientele and monitor revenue simply by tracking purchases. Hospitals cannot count on any of that. The very nature of healthcare makes those things nearly impossible to tabulate.
Hospital employees help patients with the goal that they won’t have to return — at least not consistently. With so many steps along a patient’s care cycle (inpatient and outpatient services, equipment costs, material costs, labor, etc.), adding up the cost and revenue of each patient makes the job of healthcare accountants a tough one.
Fortunately, there is a simpler way. CostFlex has created the Patient and Service Line Cost Accounting Software with healthcare organizations in mind since the beginning, from the big picture down to every last intuitive feature. Here are three reasons CostFlex’s software is the right choice for service line cost accounting in hospitals.
1. Efficiency
Time is money. In the healthcare industry, the profit margins are slim and don’t allow much wiggle room for excess costs. The solution? Cut whatever overhead costs you can. Rather than limiting the services you offer or reducing physicians, nurses, or maintenance workers, our software can save money by minimizing the amount of staff you need to handle your cost accounting.
After a CostFlex project manager personally oversees the software’s installation and trains the hospital personnel who will use it, our Patient and Service Line Costing Software requires very little attention. A large accounting staff handles service line cost accounting in hospitals.
Instead of them crunching numbers around the clock, our software does the work for you instantly and accurately. Our unique software is automatically tied into the hospital’s monthly finances, so your accountants will have all your accounting information handy and ready to interpret. The best part? CostFlex also provides expert client technical support staff, ready to help you in the unlikely event that a problem arises.
2. Customization
As technology progresses and becomes more specialized, it’s surprising how many healthcare organizations continue to use generic software that was not designed with their needs in mind. Most cost accounting software is built to provide broad solutions for industries outside of the medical field.
If you are going to spend money on software that makes your cost analysis more effective, shouldn’t that software at least understand the nuances of healthcare accounting? Not only does having to fill in the gaps left by generic software make your job more difficult, you’re also simply wasting money on an accounting solution that doesn’t work — the last thing you want to do when you’re trying to maximize revenue.
This is why CostFlex’s Patient and Service Line Costing Software is the ideal option for any hospital. No two healthcare organizations are going to have identical costs and needs. Our software allows you to customize the way you view and group data extracted from your service lines. This makes it easy to find and analyze the problems and solutions unique to your organization.
3. Integration
Anyone involved in service line cost accounting in hospitals knows that costing your service lines is not the end-all-be-all. It’s a piece of a larger puzzle. It’s absolutely necessary, but there are many other factors at play when determining revenue calculations — and many of them require separate software. Migrating from one accounting program to another can be time-consuming and opens you up to human errors while transferring data. That is why CostFlex ensures that each of our software programs and tools is fully integrated with the others.
CostFlex’s Patient and Service Line Costing Software can be used in tandem with our Activity-Based Cost Accounting tool to roll charge code-level costs up to the patient level. You can then group patients into customizable service lines as you see fit. Afterward, the Service Line Analysis Reporting tool allows you to distribute the relevant information throughout your organization.
The Patient and Service Line Costing Software also provides complete integration with CostFlex’s other major software suites — Total Cost Accounting and Revenue Cycle Management. When you use these programs together, there is no aspect of service line cost accounting in hospitals that goes unchecked.