Worried about shortage of coders and poor performance of your revenue cycle? If the answer is yes, your practice needs to look beyond coding and start optimizing the Health Information Management (HIM) process to improve efficiency. Since the revenue cycle of a practice starts and ends with medical records, HIM is critical in capturing revenue successfully.
Industry Facts :
| Shortage of qualified HIM and technology workers will hit 50,000 by 2015 according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics |
| Annually, around 28 million requests are placed with HIM departments for medical records by attorneys, RACs, patients and third parties across the US |
| The job growth for health information technicians and medical records technicians is expected to increase by 21% between 2010 and 2020 |
How Can HIM Processes Benefit Your Practice?
HIM should not be underrated. Any attempt to optimize the revenue cycle should start with a careful assessment of HIM practices because medical records are the foundation for revenue capturing and billing.
Physicians Outsourcing HIM
Focus on HIM departments has increased as providers struggle to meet the deadline for ICD-10. If HIM strategies will not be reassessed before implementation of ICD-10, the new coding system will pose challenges for HIM plans. Due to periodic changes in the new coding system, a huge gap will occur between coders and HIM department. It will become necessary for practices to have a skilled team of coders and billers who can sail through changes, ensure error-free coding and bring down the risk of HIPAA breaches.
The day to day record management has become a challenge for small practices. Due to monetary constraints, they are unable to hire HIM analysts and seeking help from in-house billers and coders instead to handle this task. This has increased the burden on billing staff which creates more room for billing and coding errors.
MBC Helping Practices with HIM Testing
To sail through this challenge, many practices have started outsourcing their billing and coding needs to MedicalBillersandCoders.com. MBC has the largest team of experienced and certified coders and billers in the US. The team is regularly updated on the coding changes and HIM techniques to help physicians sail through data management or reimbursement challenges.
As the ICD-10 deadline draws closer, MBC is offering a unique program based on the ICO-10 transition and HIM testing. This program helps coders and billers to get additional industry knowledge through webinars, forums and online learning materials. The main idea behind this program is to make coding and billing procedure easy for the providers as well as the coders and billers.
