It’s not news nowadays that healthcare providers are heavily outsourcing their medical billing services to professional companies to look after their medical billing and collections. A number of physicians, hospitals, nursing homes, urgent care centres, laboratories, DME companies, and other entities associated with the healthcare industry have realized the need for professional handling to regain focus on revenue recovery mainly through the reduction in operational costs.
There lies another challenge ahead – to find out the proper medical billing service, which can provide you with the solution you are looking at your budget. It is extremely important to research rigorously by self-defined parameters for selecting the desired service. However, some common factors that can be broadly considered essential for most healthcare providers can be discussed:
Points to Ponder
Some basic points that cannot be overlooked in your search for the desired medical billing assistance will include the following:
• Accurate and efficient service: Go for the medical billing services that can take the onus of all your billing collections – accurate, complete, and timely payment from the third party payers and patients through latest technology to attain maximum efficiency in the system.
• Excellent references: Revenue is the key focus and you need more business for that and for more business you need more references. Look for medical billing services that have enough experience and reputation to provide you excellent referrals from physicians.
• Expert coding: Coding is one of the most important aspects of medical billing in this time of EMR and EHR technology. Sought medical billing services that can provide you with the required expertise in ICD-10 coding. Due to an absence of certified and experienced coders in their in-house team, most of the practices suffer from common coding issues like:
o Unbundling: Unbundling involves listing of different billing codes for charging for services falling under one billing code. This results in bill getting inflated because the items that should have been billed as a package rate get billed separately.
o Balance billing: This coding error arises when the balance bill sent to the patient after the insurance company’s price negotiation with the care provider and all of the hospital’s charges are supposed to be covered under the patient’s policy.
o Duplicate Billing: Another common billing error, which involves multiple bills getting generated for the same procedures or services.
• Dedicated account management: Always prefer a service that provides you, experts, to dedicatedly look after your collections without any extra charge. The account managers should always be within your communication range to provide assistance during an emergency.
• Flexible services: Sometimes you might need a single service like prior authorization. Choose a medical billing service that can offer you standalone services as and when required and not charge for a whole package for RCM or other packages. It should also be flexible enough to work in both the electronic and manual platforms as per the requirement.
• Special edge: A great and a good medical billing service can be distinguished by the virtue of that ‘something special’ it offers. A great medical billing service can maintain a seamless healthcare management through cutting-edge services for the patients, providing your practice with the professional guidance it needs to complete a comprehensive end-to-end revenue cycle management. An experienced and reliable company can do the trick for you by achieving the seamless overall transitions from your time and cash stripped condition to making your practice revenue-healthy, up, and running.
Errors, both electronic and human can nag your practice from getting the desired result. Signing a really able medical billing service will provide you with the shield from those errors saving you unnecessary loss of time and money!