With Medicare and private payer insurance changes and new requirements and regulations, chiropractic medical billing has become quite complex. Chiropractors need to revamp their revenue cycle technologies and billing workflows to submit clean claims, reduce denials, and get reimbursed. We shared some Chiropractic Billing Collections strategies that can streamline a practice’s financial workflow and improve revenue.
Chiropractic Billing Collections Strategies:
Educate Patients
According to a Revenue Cycle Intelligence report, to improve the patient financial experience, providers should inform patients of their financial responsibility before their office visit. Patients should understand the costs involved with chiropractic care, what their insurance covers, and what their financial responsibilities could be. patients can be given a flyer with a simple explanation of billing basics. They can be directed to a customer service number for issues that need clarification. Make sure office staff knows how to communicate with patients about billing information.
Verify Insurance
Billing success begins at the front desk. Insurance verification should be done at each visit to understand what the patient’s responsibility is. Payers offer different plans with varying deductibles and co-pay options. Getting insurance eligibility verification done by a specialist before the office visit would ensure that both the provider and the patient know how much the patient is responsible for and what’s covered. It’s important to check eligibility for returning patients who have been absent for a while. Recording accurate patient data, including insurance information and provider eligibility, is necessary for error-free claims submission.
Collect Patient Responsibility
Problems related to collecting patient responsibility are often caused by a lack of a clearly explained financial policy and/or poor administration. Patients should sign a form acknowledging that their insurance may not cover all of their care. Many patients don’t discover the limitations of their policies until they show up in your office. Identify the shortcomings of your patients’ insurance coverage. If you don’t, patients are likely to blame you rather than placing the responsibility on the insurance carrier.
Chart Notes
The quality of your patient notes can directly affect your chiropractic practice collection. The first step to improve them is to make sure your notes are legible. There is some chiropractic software that includes intuitive notes, charting, and guided documentation helping you in reducing errors. It also takes away the guesswork at deciphering handwriting. Secondly, you’ll need to establish a chiropractic treatment plan for each patient, and reflect evidence of functional improvement within the chart notes. Making sure your documentation is in compliance will increase practice collection.
Accurate Coding
Sometimes chiropractors intentionally under code in order to avoid the penalties associated with overcoding or unbundling. Others leave the coding to their administrative staff, which can be so confusing and complicated that it results in an even higher rate of errors, and an increased level of stress. It isn’t easy to stay current with coding, and this can result in reduced reimbursement, or delayed and denied claims.
Documentation
Each patient encounter should be clearly documented to prove that the service was actually performed. The four major types of documentation errors are no documentation, insufficient documentation, lack of medical necessity, and incorrect coding. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that improper payment rates attributed to insufficient documentation rose from 39.5% to 92.2% in the last four years. Special attention should be given to documentation to avoid these errors.
It would be difficult to streamline revenue cycle activities as well as taking care of patient management. Some of the successful chiropractic practices rely on medical billing companies to handle their chiropractic medical billing and coding. For more information on chiropractic billing and coding, please get in touch with us!
