You have an in-house medical billing team at your practice but how do you know they are performing their best to get you maximum revenue? Medical billing is more than just billing patients and collecting money.
Latest technology or medical billing software is a necessity if you want your in-house billers to perform and bring maximum payment for rendered services. By investing in the latest technology, it becomes easy to determine whether or not claims are likely to be accepted by the insurance companies. If you have bought high quality software, you don’t even have to update it as per the changes in rules for different insurance plans such as Medicare or Medicaid. This is because it gets updated on its own. It is of great help for billers in identifying new denial trends and speeding up revenue collection.
Billing department at your practice can enhance the collection procedure with the help of accurate data mining. They can run unique reports through the latest billing software and access relevant information that can help them in improving procedures and handle decision making. By spending money on latest billing software, practices can create custom reports with ease. This will not only help increase staff productivity but also help in identifying payment errors.
Practices need to hire experienced and certified medical billers who are well-trained in assisting medical staff when required. They need to encourage medical staff in posting of billing information in the patient check-in area. Once the payment terms are clear to the patients, there will be no confusion in billing process.
This is extremely important because if there is lack of relevant information, billers will be submitting inaccurate claims which will lead to denials. For instance, it is important to have the complete information of patients including full name, date of birth, multiple phone numbers, work information and so on. This data collection procedure will ease the collection process.
There is no doubt that the system for healthcare reimbursement is quite brutal in the US. If you don’t hire well-trained coders and billers or if you don’t have experienced front-desk staff, your practice workflow might go for a toss, affecting your earnings to a great extent. Since insurance companies and payers are also making their rules and regulations complex, occurrence of denials, lost claims, underpayments have increased.
While some work on the above-mentioned factors to improve the performance of their in-house billing team, many choose to outsource medical billing needs to a third party.
