Medical billing is not a child’s play- rarely is there a straightforward billing. The reason being is because each hospital and provider works differently and patients also deal with multiple healthcare providers – for the equipment they deal with different providers, for ER facilities there is another health provider and maybe a third for some other medical facility usage – making this a very complicated, time-consuming and costly affair. However, despite all this conglomeration of medical facilities, medical billing needs to strive for perfection to be able to better the medical collections and stay competitive simultaneously.
Plainly speaking, there are not just any “Ifs”, “And” & “Buts” in the Medical Billing period!
Why?
Costly errors =reduced reimbursements
Time wastage= negative impact on A/Rs
7 Blissful Steps to Ensure a Safe & Proper Billing
- Documentation: Every minute detail needs to be documented, right from when the patient first steps into your arena.
- Recheck: Every single data of information needs to be doubly checked before preceding right from patient demographics, and insurance eligibility to proper diagnosis and its corresponding codes.
- Timely processing: Delaying reporting and updating of information and processing of billing leads to delays in A/R days which can be a costly affair for the revenues flowing in.
- Compliances & regulations: Keeping up with the changes in healthcare reforms, coding practices, and CMS updates, rules & regulations helps keep the billing machinery well-oiled. Also, paying attention to fee schedule updates which if not caught in time could cost you huge losses.
- Follow-ups: All claims submitted rejected or denied should be diligently followed through help avoid errors and an opportunity to resubmit the claim ASAP before it gets denied and maintain as little as a gap as possible for meeting the A/R timeline.
- Coding Appropriately: Avoid up-coding or under-coding. Up-coding is illegal and can lead to fines and criminal prosecution. Under-coding is also illegal and can have legal repercussions. Code as to near perfect as to the documentation provided with rechecks for every code entered.
- Automate: There are more than 3,000 payers with their own set of guidelines or regulations. Automation is a fast and least troublesome way to get paid. Billing services and the software will scrub your claims for you, ensuring that your claims have all the information they need.
Take accountability for your medical practice billing to help create a clean claim the first time through. Thus, an increase in your medical billing collection rate after insurance adjustments by following the above 7 steps will help avoid the “Ifs”, “and” & “Buts” in your Medical Billing Practice achieving 98 percent of saying at least 80 percent of patient billing!
