A vital aspect of any medical practice is effective Medical Billing and Coding, but for small and medium-size medical practices, it’s quite often one of the most overlooked aspects. There can be a situation that you might be seeing the payment denials with the same or more patients, or you are unable to reimburse on a significant portion of your billed charges. It’s time to evaluate your medical billing workflows.
Following are important things your in-house staff or outsourced medical billing company can do before the claim goes out to ensure you are able to get reimbursed as much of your billed charges as possible.
Verify Insurance Multiple Times
Insurance coverage or information is the common reason behind almost many rejected or denied claims. That could be incorrect patient information (e.g. spelling error in name or possibly a wrong date of birth), or changes in insurance coverage.
In some cases, it’s as simple as correcting an error, such as a misplaced text or number in the patient’s insurance ID. In other cases, it can be complicated; such as a patient that had insurance but it is not covering treatment. That is especially significant to check right now as many patients are experiencing job loss as a result of COVID-19.
Even when there is a simple mistake, it takes time for your medical biller to find out what went wrong, to correct it, and resubmit it. There are time limits that payers require to get these corrections. If your practice misses these timelines then you won’t get paid.
It’s an easy solution to use your medical practice management software to cross-check the patient’s insurance coverage, when the patient schedules an appointment. Your billing company should also check insurance coverage right before the appointment. This way if there is any error then it can be identified and corrected well in advance.
Use Technology to Improve Payment Collection
After your medical billing team submits the claim to the payer and there is still some outstanding balance, you can send an invoice to your patients by email. But it is actually more effective to send them an automatic notification about their invoices being due.
A follow-up text message and an email reminder can save your practice the expense of mailed billing and more likely to produce an immediate response from a patient. It is crucial to have a method for have an online invoice payment to patients so they can easily clear outstanding balances without the need to mail a check.
Use of Software
After your front desk staff enters patient information into the EHR, you need that information to transfer to the billing department fast and efficiently. If you are using two systems and those are not interconnected to transfer information to between them that means someone has to manually enter information from EHR and input it into medical practice management software. This activity takes time and increases the chance of an error in data.
The best solution to keep your medical billing operations flowing smoothly and efficiently it is ideal that you outsource medical billing and coding process, which helps to streamline the rest of the processes in your medical practice. If you are looking for the best outsourcing partner to support you in revenue growth, contact RevPro Healthcare Solutions at 561-578-8400, With over 20 years of practice management experience, our team knows how to leverage technology and best practices to run a successful business in healthcare.