Article Highlights
- Constant changes in healthcare affect medical billing and revenue collections.
- Identify common billing challenges holding back your healthcare organization.
- Take action by improving processes and outsourcing medical billing to PMB.
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Constant changes to the healthcare industry make it difficult for physicians, medical practices, and other healthcare providers to keep up with things such as medical billing and, ultimately, getting paid for all of your hard work. When things change such as healthcare regulations, billing requirements, insurance protocols, and laws, your medical billing processes must be flexible to adapt to these changes.
What are your options? You could either train existing staff, continue to hire staff to keep up with the changes, which will create additional overhead costs, or you could outsource this process to an expert medical billing company like Precision Medical Billing that can handle billing and coding for you.
As you think about your options, let’s first examine common problems in medical billing. This way, we can help you identify issues affecting your practice and then create a clear path forward to optimize revenue collections for your services.
Common Setbacks to Improving Your Medical Billing Process
Although some constraints for improving your medical billing procedures can be unique to your practice, other setbacks are shared across the industry. From insurance company restrictions to revenue cycle management, oftentimes there is only so much progress that can be made. Yet, understanding the constraints of your organization is the best place to start in your attempt to improve your medical billing processes.
1. Ever-Changing Regulations
One of the most hindering factors in improving medical billing processes is the constant change of industry regulations. Just when you are making headway with upgrades and enhancements, another rule is introduced that must be adhered to.
This creates constant adjustments to processes used to submit claims, set up payment plans, and direct cash flow. Billing departments seldom have adequate time to prepare for regulatory changes, often causing them to develop new protocols in a quick and inconsistent manner trying to react to the change — or worse, losing hard-earned revenue because they were uninformed.
As an organization that bases our business largely on medical billing and coding assistance, Precision Medical Billing stays up-to-date on impending market changes and prepares our clients for the future in advance. We help our clients stay up and running by supporting procedural changes to comply with regulation revisions.
2. Rejection of Misfiled Claims
Errors in claim submissions can lead to an increase in denied claims, which can harm a healthcare organization’s cash flow and initiate the collections process for patients.
In a busy environment, claim submission errors are easy to make. From simple typing errors to incorrect coding, claims can be rejected for a variety of reasons. While slowing down processes and double-checking input can help, not every healthcare practice has the time or staff to be as thorough as you would like.
This is where outsourcing medical billing to an outside entity can help. With extensive knowledge of physician practices, PMB specializes in medical claims coding, billing, and processing to help you avoid common errors with medical codes that lead to rejected claims. PMB reviews and analyzes monthly denials to ensure the issues are not being repeated. This helps you increase the rate of receiving payment for services rendered.
3. Inaccurate Billing Processes
Medical billing errors are costly. In fact, billions of dollars are lost by healthcare organizations every year because of errors. Whether your practice is victimized by a pattern of incorrect processing or simply random errors that occur over time, your practice could be experiencing a substantial decrease in income from these inconsistencies.
Structured billing processes and keeping your employees up-to-date on regulation changes are just a few of the ways to optimize medical claims processing. It is challenging to stay on top of this, though, which makes it easier and more cost-efficient to hire a company like PMB to support the entire process.
What Actions Can You Take to Improve Medical Billing?
Keeping up with constant changes to medical billing and coding is difficult. No matter how much effort you place into processing medical claims and completing the billing and coding process, there will always be room for improvement because there is constantly something new to consider.
It’s not as simple as making a few minor changes or re-assigning tasks to other employees. Oftentimes, this requires an entire overhaul of medical billing processes if you want to increase your rate of revenue collections and maintain a profitable practice.
Here is a good list of action items to start on the path of improving medical billing:
- Monitor billing processes to find improvement recommendations.
- Upgrade software to meet regulatory requirements.
- Continue to perform maintenance.
- Inspect records for completeness.
- Provide constant training to employees.
- Protect patient information during a transition.
As you can see, this is a hefty job to undertake, especially in the area of protecting patient information. We know that it can be challenging to maintain privacy and follow HIPAA laws to protect the integrity of patient information when you are trying to make changes to how your team handles medical billing and claims processing.
For experienced companies like PMB, these risky tasks are part of the service that we offer to healthcare providers. We specialize in identifying and delivering tailored solutions that address the unique constraints in your practice.
Let PMB Handle Medical Billing and Coding
As a healthcare professional, your time should be spent focusing on the well-being and health of your patients. However, when medical billing and coding issues start to affect the overall health of your practice, this will affect your ability to provide quality care to patients.
Let us take that burden off you and your employees by providing outsourced medical billing and coding services. Our team understands that your patients benefit the most from receiving quality care, and we want to help you achieve this objective.
As the leading provider of outsourced medical billing services in the U.S., we can take the weight off your shoulders so that you and your team can focus on what matters most.
– Contact us today to schedule a free consultation on how to improve medical billing for your practice. Let’s also talk about how we can deliver a custom billing and coding solution for your practice.
