Should you become an RHC?
Making the Decision: Should Your Clinic Transition to an RHC?
Now that we’ve explored the requisites, the process, and the advantages of becoming an RHC, it’s time to address the crucial question: “Should my clinic pursue Rural Health Clinic status?”
To guide your decision-making, consider the following questions:
- Is my clinic experiencing declining reimbursement?
- Am I situated in an area designated as a Medically Underserved Area (MUA) or Health Professional Shortage Area (HPSA)?
- Do we currently have a physician assistant or nurse practitioner on staff?
- Is my location characterized by a substantial Medicare/Medicaid patient volume?
- Are my providers actively engaged in community care?
Want to learn more?
Watch the full webinar on if you should become a rural health clinic and learn more about what Azalea does for rural health on our website.
Video Transcript
30:18
Let’s take a look at some of the considerations and our summary that we should do. Some of the questions, I think, that you probably want to ask yourself, first off, as, are you in a medically underserved or hips for a designated area?
30:33
And, as I said, we’re going to talk more in detail about that on one of the other webinars, when we learn how to go to that site, to look at our scores and to pull up that information.
30:44
Then, we also want to look at our clinic reimbursement. Is it declining? Are we having difficulty being able to manage our operational costs versus our income? Note is, RHC, possibly, an answer and an alternative for us. And that would be important for us to do that feasibility study and look at that to see. do we have a physician’s assistant or nurse practitioner or healthcare extend their own staff, or, do we need to go out and hire one? If so, what does that cost is going to be to us? What does that look like?
31:20
if we’re already struggling with operational costs, do we have a high Medicare, Medicaid population in our area?
31:28
Hopefully, you can pull that from your computer system, and you can take a look to see what percentage of your patients coming into your practice, or Medicare, Medicaid, and what percentage are commercial.
31:42
Is your software capable of billing split claims, or is it going to cost you a reimbursement or an expense, excuse me, not a reimbursement, an expense to go out and to buy a new software system, And we all know buying a new software system can be expensive, but it also costs us and getting it up and running and operating.
32:07
We usually delay revenue. We don’t lose it, but we delay revenue, sometimes, with implementation of that.
32:15
Um, does your provider work within the health system? Does he have access to like home visits, nursing homes, and other things in the community, where he can provide a full service for your patients, Being able to bring other visits into the clinic?
32:35
Sometimes, you know that we’ll have a big, a large, enough patient base, that we don’t need to go out to those other places, but certainly, if we can, those are visits that we can capture as well.
