A poor medical billing process can impact the patient influx and the performance analysis of a medical practice. Medical billing involves a lot of intricacies making it a complex and time taking process. Inaccuracy and fallacies in the medical billing system can cause financial losses as well as loss of credibility for patients.
1) Payment Gateway Options
With reference to a McKinsey study, although 74% of the uninsured patients are willing and able to make out-of-pocket payments up to $1000 per annum for medical purpose and 90% willing to pay up to $500 per annum, they still hesitate when it comes to actually paying up upfront. The reasons being:
- Limited medical billing options
- Insurance contract issues
- No cope mechanism for policies and ambiguous statements
- Inconvenient bill timings
- Lack of payment schedule in sync with the organization’s medical billing process
These prove to be major barriers for issuing payments. This has led to the consumers’ discouragement and hence reduced loyalty rate too.
2) Old Billing Systems
With changing times, mainly since the gradual economic recession recovery, the patients in the US are being increasingly burdened financially to pay a considerably high part of the medical bills. The old systems of after service billing lead to bad debts or over burdening the patients for overdue and balances.
3) Extended Payment Discussions
Since the heathcare reforms the actual consultation time of the doctor with the patient is often spent in discussing about the payment options feasible for the patient, especially if the paying capacity of the patient is on the lower side. This hampers the other patients’ appointment schedule and eventually leads to loss of clientele.
4) Aggressive Debt Collection Measures
As a result of poor medical billing process, healthcare organizations often have to implement aggressive debt collection measures to avoid losses and debt. This is a setback to their patient-healthcare priority. Also, such organizations have to be updated about the state debt regulations becoming stringent day by day particularly in case of denials or delay of treatment, family members’ access to patients.
Solutions:
A survey report states that financial responsibility of the patients under certain health plans is now approaching the range of 15% – 20%, as compared to the previous range of 6% – 10%.
Hence it has become increasingly necessary for the providers to outsource medical billing services in order to harness a better proactive approach like:
- Patient eligibility verification of insurance policy, financial capability, co-pay requirements and pre planning of flexible payment options based on this information
- Creating ways to assist and connect patients to medical financial counsellors / insurance carriers to address a safe payment schedule
- Ensure correct processing of claims by insurance payers
- Shift to modern systems
- Outsource to a reliable service provider like MedicalBillersandCoders.com
Ongoing research and practical application results have led the physicians and other healthcare entities to resort to outsourcing medical billing services because of cutting edge expert medical billing systems and years of expertise.
