An increasing number of healthcare facilities are facing medical billing problems. It may be attributed to the fact that insurance companies have developed a complex set of processes and rules that often result in ignored claims, underpayments, denials and lost claims.
According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, about 30 percent of all submitted claims are either ignored or lost. Increasing medical billing revenue is of particular importance within public health facilities where demand is growing while funding is either dipping or stagnant. If you are experiencing this, you should consider implementing our medical billing systems practices, which can boost revenue by up to 70 percent.
The initial step towards optimizing the medical billing process in order to increase revenue would be to implement a consistent appointment-only schedule. It will result in increased accuracy in capturing the patients’ billing information.
Additionally, such a measure will also ensure that you verify the patients’ insurance before treatment. Introducing such a structure in a public health facility may be cumbersome, but is important when it comes to optimizing and cleaning up the billing process and claims.
To effectively manage the receivables in your clinic, it is vital that you implement reporting metrics that are measurable for all the employees in the clinic. The concept here is pretty simple; that which is measured is managed in a better way.
Performance measurements are a critical aspect to your business when creating efficient management of the receivables within any healthcare facility. As such, the employees in the clinic must be accountable for performance.
Verifying the patients’ insurance before offering services has been proven to improve the charge-to-collection ratio in various healthcare facilities. In this regard, it is highly advisable that you have the insurance coverage of all your patients verified before their scheduled appointment. You may use any of the following methods to check the insurance coverage: telephone insurance verification, EMR or billing software, or online payer resources.
You may also assign the verification work to a single employee to improve the accuracy of the verification process. This allows you enough time to reschedule the patient if you cannot verify their insurance coverage.
Since the primary aim here is to optimize the reimbursement coming in, you should ensure that the claims are accurate and clean. The reimbursements coming into the clinic from various insurance companies is directly related to the information you send. Sending claims that are error-free will result in faster processing and payments by the insurer.