There are several ways your medical practice can lose money. Today, I will cover the two most common ways, which are your billing and collection systems.
Having a designated person(s) whose primary duties are accounts receivables is one of the best ways to insure that the accounts are worked on a regular (daily) basis (Even if you use an outside Billing company). If this person is not the office manager then the office manager needs to work closely with this person to be the “net” for them, as this is an important job and can become overwhelming at times.
My recommendation is to have more than one person trained to follow or work the A/R depending on the size of the practice. This is also true when using a billing company as the A/R needs to still be followed and possibly assisted with for documentation or coding issues.
Watching the receivables is similar to watching the stock market but opposite you don’t want it to go up. It is that you have to diligently watch it daily to see the trends of payors and to know when action needs to be taken on accounts.
It is vitally important that front desk persons who check patients in collect all copayments, balances and deductible portions. Letting any money slip past this point uncollected is an additional expense and loss to the practice.
Every call and statement costs the practice money,(even if a billing company is doing the job). If the patient is in the practice collect what is due or make arrangements at that time. The longer your money is out there the less you are actually getting when it comes in because of the cost to collect it and the chances of it going uncollected.
Collecting all patient responsibility portions should be a number one priority in the office by every staff member.
Billing and coding correctly takes continuing education. Filling the billing invoice out should be a simple task in your billing software. In many cases when auditing the chart notes against the billing invoice there are discrepancies such as finding that the note says a procedure was done, but it is not on the added to the software billing invoice.
If situations like this were not caught by diligently cleaning all claims (by someone in the practice) it would have been lost income. With electronic medical records it should be easier to make sure that everything that is billable is billed, but all claims still need a last set of eyes to ensure correctness.
It is important to make sure that you have the up-to-date coding information by not billing correctly using wrong codes or billing for procedures that are not payable it costs you money.
When staff take time researching billing problems only to find out it should not have been billed in the first place you have just paid for their time to do so. Remember non-productive time spent by staff equals bottom line losses.
By setting standards for improvement of the above issues not only can began to increasing your bottom line, but you will be creating a more efficient medical office which physicians and staff will enjoy working at each day.
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