What It Really Costs a Critical Access Hospital to Collect a Dollar
Quick answer: Cost to collect is the total cost of your revenue cycle divided by the cash it brings in. HFMA has cited 2% as a best-practice standard for hospitals, but a critical access hospital (CAH) rarely fits that comparison. Low claim volume, a difficult payer mix and cost-based Medicare reimbursement all change the math. […]
Denial Management for Rural Health Clinics: The RHC-Specific Billing Mistakes That Kill Reimbursement
Rural Health Clinics exist to serve the patients that the broader healthcare system routinely underserves, namely Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in areas where access to care is already scarce. The payment model that supports them, the All-Inclusive Rate, was designed to make that mission financially viable. It was not designed to absorb the mounting administrative […]
Why CAH Claims Get Denied — and How Revenue Cycle Teams Can Prevent Them
Critical Access Hospitals were built to survive on thin margins. Twenty-five beds. A 96-hour average length of stay. A cost-based Medicare reimbursement model designed to keep rural facilities financially viable. What the CAH program was not designed to survive is a denial environment that has grown steadily more hostile, more expensive, and more structurally complex […]
The Denial Management Gap: What National Benchmarks Miss About Rural and Community Health Billing
Denials are at the top of the list of healthcare’s revenue cycle problems. A January 2026 MGMA Stat poll of medical group practice leaders found denials and appeals are the single biggest source of revenue cycle leakage, cited by 48 percent of respondents, more than front-end issues, billing and collections, and coding combined.[1] That tracks […]
10 Things to Know Before Choosing an FQHC Billing Partner
Revenue cycle leaders at community health centers rarely seek out a billing partner because things are going well. Usually, a coding vacancy has sat open for months, a Medicaid managed care plan has just changed its wraparound reconciliation process, or a board member has asked why days in accounts receivable keep climbing. Community health centers […]
The End of G2025: What RHC and FQHC Billing Teams Need to Know Before October 1, 2026
Rural Health Clinics and Federally Qualified Health Centers have relied on a single billing code for distant site telehealth services since 2020. Effective October 1, 2026, that convenience disappears. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) issued Change Request 14468 on May 27, 2026, instructing Medicare Administrative Contractors to require RHCs and FQHCs to […]
Credentialing and Payer Enrollment Bottlenecks at Rural Facilities: Why the Billing Office Feels It First
Rural hospitals and clinics rarely lose revenue in dramatic, headline-grabbing ways. More often, it leaks out quietly through a stalled credentialing file sitting in a committee queue, or a payer enrollment application waiting on a Medicare Administrative Contractor to process it. For Critical Access Hospitals (CAH), Rural Emergency Hospitals (REH), and the Rural Health Clinics […]
End-to-End Revenue Cycle Management for Rural Emergency Hospitals and Critical Access Hospitals
Rural hospitals have always operated on the financial edge. Thin margins, limited staff, aging populations, and payer mixes heavily weighted toward Medicare and Medicaid—none of that is new. What is new is the pace at which those pressures are compounding. A February 2025 analysis from the Chartis Center for Rural Health found that 46% of […]
IOP Billing for FQHCs: Building a Clean Workflow for Medicare’s Newest Behavioral Health Benefit
Most FQHC billing teams have spent the last two years getting comfortable with a fairly stable set of payment rules: PPS rates, GAF adjustments, and the annual market basket update. Then a new benefit category showed up that doesn’t follow any of that logic, and many health centers are still trying to build the workflow […]
What Is the FQHC Prospective Payment System — and How Does It Affect Your Revenue Cycle?
For health center administrators and revenue cycle professionals, the Prospective Payment System (PPS) isn’t just a reimbursement model. It’s the financial foundation your entire operation is built on — and understanding it in depth is non-negotiable. If you’ve worked in FQHC billing for any length of time, you already know the Prospective Payment System by […]