4 Medical Billing Tips That Will Boost Reimbursements

1. Eligibility, Eligibility, Eligibility!

In real-estate, it’s all about location. In a medical practice, it’s ALL ABOUT ELIGIBILITY. Eligibility used to be a daunting task for even the stacked roster billing office. The IPA’s use what I like to call The Three Card Monte; you know the street card hustle where you have to keep your eye on the card? Reading an HMO insurance card and submitting the claim to the right vendor is not far from that hustle. Both are equally annoying and difficult.

Beef up your eligibility by utilizing the right medical billing and practice management platform. I highly recommend AdvancedMD to get you through the fight.

2. Collections, Collections, Collections!

So, we submitted that clean, 100% accurate claim. But still haven’t been reimbursed? Your collector works the phones and harasses the insurance carrier..

Normally, insurance carriers will only allow a collector to call for no more than three claims. That means after the limit is reached, your collector has to call the insurance carrier again, and wait on hold for an average of 25 minutes to speak to a representatives regarding another three claims. What a waste of valuable time!

Have your collector ask for a fax number, and compile an Excel list of all the claims you’re inquiring about. Include: Patients name, DOB, insurance ID number, DOS, providers tax ID and name. Include your fax back number on the cover sheet.

This will save you time and money, and will afford your staff opportunities to tackle tasks that have been on the backburner.

If your collectors are working on your A/R and there is little progress, cross reference your credentialing with your contracted insurance carriers. Read our blog IDENTIFYING YOUR A/R and see what is hurting your practice.

3. Get rid of your in-house biller

If you’re running a practice with an in-house biller, I urge you to reconsider this business strategy. You could be losing money by the illusion of saving money. Many of our clients came to us on the brink of bankruptcy because they employed a friend or a family member to oversee billing and collections. While we can appreciate the gesture to your friends and family, medical billing is incredibly complex and time consuming, and requires many dedicated departments with tons of experience.

You may see it as saving a couple of bucks by keeping your billing in-house, but consider how much more your practice could profit if your claims are scrubbed, tested, submitted and a team of collectors harassed the insurance companies for every dollar on the tab. All for a small percentage of WHAT IS COLLECTED! Not hours logged!

Third party medical billing and practice management companies have so much technology to offer. This leads me to number 4.

4. Streamline your office.

Time is money, and time wasted on tasks that could otherwise be done in minutes is heart/bank breaking. A good EHR and Practice Management platform is a bit on the pricy side. Learning and implementing it may seem overwhelming as well. But the reward is amazing, beautiful and even majestic.

Instead of manually entering in patient demographics, just take a picture of the patient’s driver’s license barcode and the data will automatically populate into your system.

Your patient can fill out consent forms, allergy lists, and other paperwork protocols from the comfort of their own home. The data will auto-fill into the patient profile.

However, all this technology is useless unless you have the right billing & practice management company running the back end of your offices day to day.

Certified Healthcare Network is a medical billing and practice management service that is dedicated medical providers and maximizing their reimbursements & office work flow.

We have tripled our client’s reimbursements and have streamlined office tasks.

For more information on how CHN can boost your bottom line, please contact us at Connect@chnbilling.com or call us at (888) 504-5114

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