From patient registration and insurance verification to payment posting and performance monitoring, a lot goes into a healthcare organization's revenue processes. Revenue cycle management (RCM) encompasses the full range of these operations, ensuring that facilities receive prompt, complete payment for all their services rendered. It includes front-end, documentation, and back-end operations. But having so many touchpoints makes it easy for things to go wrong without clear and usable data analysis.
So what is revenue cycle analytics? By leveraging the data from your RCM processes, you can gain actionable insights into your operations. Identify opportunities for improvement across your RCM pipeline to accelerate payment cycles, reduce revenue leakage, and increase your profitability. The result is fewer claims denials, higher reimbursement rates, faster repayment, and a facility with better financial health — as long as you have the right tool to pull it off.
Discover the role that revenue cycle analytics plays in RCM for LTPAC facilities. We'll also show which metrics facilities should evaluate to monitor their financial performance, and how a tool like ChartPath can elevate your analytics processes.
RCM workflows generate large amounts of data, but mining that data for insights on how to improve your operations can be a challenge. Revenue cycle analytics collects, interprets, and stores this data to give you a better understanding of your revenue generation processes, so that you can eliminate any inefficiencies in your revenue cycle.
For example, many long-term post-acute care (LTPAC) facilities may struggle with high denial rates or lengthy repayment times, straining their revenue generation processes. Healthcare revenue cycle analytics can reveal the root causes of these inefficiencies, such as coding errors that lead to claim denials or a large number of Days in Accounts Receivable (A/R).
Once you've identified the causes, you can take steps to streamline your RCM operations, improving the financial health of your LTPAC facility.
Revenue cycle analytics collects and analyzes data across your facility's billing cycle. It shows which areas of your operations are functioning efficiently and which could use improvement. Getting a clear picture of any performance gaps helps you form strategies for optimizing your cash flow.
One key way that revenue cycle analytics can protect your revenue streams is by reducing the number of healthcare clawbacks you may incur. In 2025, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) proposed a rule change to recover 7.8 billion USD in overpayments, which could create a substantial disruption in many healthcare practices' financial operations. Revenue cycle analytics helps reduce the discrepancies that can lead to overpayments, so that you'll be able to keep any payments you've received for services rendered.
Revenue cycle analytics looks at a range of key performance indicators (KPIs) to yield data-driven insights into how you can improve your facility's financial performance. The exact metrics you track will vary with the state of your current financial operations, but common revenue cycle KPIs include:
Denial rate: The percentage of claims that are rejected upon first submission. This KPI should be as low as possible — less than 5% is a success.
Days in Accounts Receivable (A/R): The amount of time it takes for a claim submission to be accepted. Aim for less than 45 days on average.
Clean claims rate: The number of claims that are fully accepted on the first try. This KPI indicates the health of your billing systems, and the higher the better.
While some revenue cycle KPIs largely reflect the efficiency of your backend RCM processes, others are highly dependent on the rest of your health IT infrastructure. For example, electronic health records (EHR) play a crucial role in facilitating payments from the patient, which in turn can impact the amount of time that accounts spend in A/R.
An effective EHR system not only can improve patient satisfaction by providing a convenient platform for payment and notifications, but will feature documentation and coding capabilities that reduce billing errors, raising clean claims rates and accelerating reimbursement in the process. The result is better transparency between patients and healthcare organizations, less bad debt on your books, and a boost to your bottom line.
From reducing the number of claims denials to fostering better business decisions, revenue cycle analytics can benefit medical practices in a variety of ways across different organizations. For instance, hospital revenue cycle analytics may employ predictive analytics to anticipate future profit margins and develop a plan for long-term growth, while LTPAC facilities may rely on long-term care accounting to balance their staffing expenses and operational costs.
In both cases, facilities wishing to implement revenue cycle analytics software into their current environment must take careful steps to ensure that their tool helps them reach their business goals. For example, data integration is key for all RCM analytics, so make sure your tool possesses the interoperability needed to consolidate your RCM data into a single source of truth.
Each facility will also require different data analytics capabilities for each application. Check if your tool comes with revenue cycle management services such as predictive, prescriptive, or diagnostic data analytics tools, depending on your intended use.
Whether it's the documentation workflows during a patient encounter or the many administrative tasks that occur before and after each interaction, the RCM journey involves multiple steps with plenty of room for error. With healthcare revenue cycle management analytics, you can mine each of these steps for insights on the financial health of your operations, so facilities can minimize their inefficiencies and maximize their profitability.
Revenue cycle analytics software provides a single secure platform where you can store, share, interpret, and present your RCM data, turning analysis findings into applicable results. Complete with built-in RCM and revenue cycle analytics functionalities, ChartPath is a leading EHR solution. This interoperable platform is compatible with other RCM tools, providing a single source of truth for your RCM data and improving your operational efficiency.
End-to-end documentation, coding, and RCM capabilities make it an all-in-one solution for facilities of all sizes, and built-in analytics tools help LTPAC practices turn raw data into more revenue. And with 24/7 customer support, ChartPath is committed to giving you a seamless RCM experience. Contact us for a live demo today.