What is RCM (Revenue Cycle Management)?
Revenue cycle management (RCM) is the end-to-end process of getting paid for care delivered - verifying benefits, obtaining authorizations, capturing services, coding and submitting claims, posting payments, and working denials and balances.
The cycle starts before a client is ever seen. Verifying eligibility and securing authorization up front decides whether sessions delivered weeks later are payable at all, which is why intake is treated as part of the revenue cycle rather than as paperwork before it.
It continues through the session itself: what was delivered, by whom, for how long, and whether the documentation supports it. Claims are built from that record, submitted, and then tracked - posting payments, reconciling underpayments, and appealing denials.
Practices either run this in-house on billing software or hand it to a managed service. Either way the measures are the same: how much of what is billed actually gets collected, how long it takes, and how much is lost to denials and write-offs.