The periodic fluctuations in the United States healthcare system have brought about changes for patients and providers. These changes include many facets of healthcare reform, including the addition of time-taking value-based compensation models and the extensive alterations of medical billing rules and regulations. In such a situation, your practice must follow medical billing tips to maintain revenue inflow and claim efficiency.
This causes profound revenue loss in medical billing for providers across the United States.
Key Takeaways
Not staying up-to-date with the medical billing rules and regulations and errors in medical billing mark $125 billion in uncollected revenue every year in the U.S. How can you as a provider stay up-to-date and error-free – seek reliable and best medical billing services? In addition, knowing and understanding when to outsource your billing to a professional medical billing service is essential. Moreover, your practice must follow expert-driven medical billing tips to choose a reliable medical billing company.
The best Medical billing services help:
- Formulate a precise and clear collections process
- Manage Medical claims effectively
- Manage Rejected and denied claims
- Improve procedures while tracking account receivables
- Outsourcing to a professional medical company like the Physicians Revenue Group offers your practice dedicated medical specialists, fast and secure submissions, and a single-minded focus on patients while keeping you up-to-date with healthcare laws and regulations.
Let’s examine how a medical billing company helps you maintain revenue while keeping your practice on top.
Formulating Medical Billing Collections Process
Medical providers need a precise collection process to guarantee the financial health of their practice. Therefore, curating a step-wise process with effective medical billing tips is necessary to establish a straightforward procedure. The essential steps of a collection process include:
Devising Clear Terms and Conditions
Expert-level medical billing tips inform patients what is expected of them about paying their debts. This can be done by incorporating text regarding their responsibility to pay in their new patient paperwork and generally reminding them of their payments responsibilities and obligations – all the more so if and when changes occur. By doing so, patients can’t claim ignorance for their delinquency.
Accumulate Patient Information
Gather and retrieve as much patient information as possible, including their phone numbers, addresses, emails, and workplace information. It is essential to require a photograph (ID) on a patient’s first visit.
A photo ID is essential if a medical bill needs to be forwarded to a collections agency down the lane.
Authenticate Address Information
Medical billing tips are helpful in training the medical staff to acquire patients' current residential addresses and contact information for updating patient profiles in case of change. Therefore, it is crucial to easily reach patients so resources, including money and time, are not wasted by calling outdated numbers and sending mail to old addresses.
Consent for Leaving Messages
Medical billing companies work to include a permission clause in the new patient paperwork that permits messages to be left on the patients’ voicemail for billing-related matters.
Eligibility Verification
To avoid claim rejections and denials effectively, verify patient eligibility and retrieve insurance cards with each visit. Medical billing companies also offer an automated verification system that saves you considerably on labor costs.
Establishing Payment Methods
It is important to establish the payment methods available to the patient early in the process. Clarify what the payments will cover and whether checks and credit card payments are acceptable, in addition to propagating payment plans, if any.
Line of Letters
Medical billing companies send periodic sequences of letters when the bills are due, overdue, or in the process of being sent to collections. However, some patients require multiple reminders before taking action. In addition, a physical letter carries much more psychological weight than a voicemail.
This entire process is time-consuming and somewhat detailed; however, implementing a standard collection process through a medical billing company helps healthcare providers collect payments swiftly and without incident.
The medical billing companies not only help practices identify sending a bill for collection, but they also help eradicate the lack of knowledge or communication as a reason for patient delinquency. Plus, you can effectively manage the revenue cycle with a professional medical service provider.
Manage Medical Billing Claims Effectively
More than 75 percent of medical bills are prone to errors, and with how strict insurance companies are in medical coding and billing practices, the bills with errors are promptly rejected.
Thus commences the cycle of rejection, editing, and resubmitting – all of this collectively takes weeks, if not months. In the meantime, medical providers must wait for their services reimbursement.
The standard errors include incorrect patient information (including names, insurance ID numbers, and DOB) and wrong provider information (including name, address, contact information, and more). Other errors in medical bills include inaccurate insurance information, duplicate billing, meager documentation, absence of EOB on a denied claim, unclear and missing denial codes, claim reference numbers, etc.
What’s the solution?
The hard path is double-checking claims before submission and communicating with the rendering services provided if the data needs to be clarified, complete, or consistent. In comparison, the easier way out for medical practices is to leave all the technical details to a medical billing company such as the Physicians Revenue Group.
Medical billing companies take care of the entire submission cycle and follow up with the insurance company representative to effectively release the payments.
Seek Avenues of Improvement
The medical healthcare industry is constantly changing; thus, physician practices need to follow suit to maximize revenue and boost efficiency. Physicians Revenue Group, as your medical billing partner, helps you track your performance while keeping you updated with the current healthcare regulations.
Medical billing companies help identify problem areas and devise new effective tools and medical billing tips for addressing them. Some of the tools and steps include:
Tracking Account Receivable (Pending)
The money owed to a medical practice is an important indication for gauging the effectiveness of any collection procedure. Therefore, the quarterly tracking of this amount and comparing it to the figures of passing years is an excellent way to stay on top while cumulating the effectiveness and performance of the current revenue cycle.
Keep Up with Information
The rules of medical billing change constantly, and keeping up with these necessitates constant learning, education, and following proven medical billing tips. Keeping up with all this is rather costly, especially when you can outsource to the medical billing services, which keep their staff on top of any alterations affecting coding or billing protocols, offering periodic training wherever necessary.
Why Outsource Medical Billing to Physicians Revenue Group?
Medical practices shall only have to focus on their patients and their well-being, trends of medicine, and effective staff management.
Keeping up with the changing rules of billing regulations, coding standards, and insurance companies becomes too much to stay on top of, resulting in details slipping through the cracks. When details are missed, it results in denials, rejections, and improper underpayments that cost medical practices loss of time and money. Therefore, seeking the services of a professional medical billing company becomes more crucial.
Some benefits of outsourcing medical billing include the following:
Swift Submissions:
The professional and highly trained staff works to submit claims swiftly and with greater attention to detail.
Enhanced Focus on Patients:
Once medical practices eliminate the time spent on staffing and billing concerns, the nurses and doctors can effectively focus better on their patients.
Keeping in Touch with Current Standards:
Best medical billing services and companies remain compliant with the current healthcare laws and regulations for serving the demands of hospital-based specialty services.
Physicians Revenue Group – Leading in Medical Billing Services and Billing Specialists
Medical billing companies enclose a team of dedicated staff whose sole responsibility is ensuring the accuracy of medical billing. The experienced staff at PRG works to file the claims correctly while the denied claims are properly resubmitted.
The professionals, owing to their specialized experience and line of duty, pay undivided attention to minutiae that the medical practice employees often miss in the daily bustle of their duties.
Seek medical billing plans and learn more about the all-encompassing services by contacting PRG.
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