What are the Traits of the Physician Billing Process that Helps You Drive Maximum Revenue?

Is your medical practice struggling with significant revenue loss? It’s an undeniable sign that your physician billing process is not on track. You must seriously think about the effective strategies that can streamline your billing as well as your revenue cycle. 

Successful physician billing is the key to strengthening the bottom line of your practice. Therefore, healthcare providers should never take it for granted.  Sometimes physicians decide to manage the billing department in-house. It is possible that they hand over this responsibility to the employees, who are already wearing too many hats.  

In such circumstances, they can’t pay proper attention to the billing process and end up with a high rate of claim denials. They gradually push your medical business into an unrecoverable crisis. However, the decision of in-house billing can also increase the financial burden on physicians. Because they have to spend a lot of money on the overhead costs including hiring and constant training of the billing team, salaries, employee incentives, office workspace, and purchase of advanced software. 

On the other hand, by outsourcing the primary billing process, you can save money on all these o[erational costs. Off-shore partners have access to the state-of-the-art infrastructure to perform your billing tasks effectively. Moreover, they reduce the administrative burden of healthcare providers and allow them to truly focus on providing quality care services to their patients. 

Well, it all depends on the physicians whether they choose to in-house or outsource primary billing services. No matter what they choose, they should analyze the specific and crucial traits in their billing process.  If you don’t know, which billing aspects optimize the revenue cycle management, this article will guide you. 

• Flexible Payment Options 

The more flexible payment methods you offer to your patients ensure that you get paid quickly. Physicians must understand the fact that the patient’s bad experience on the financial side can leave a negative mark on their medical practice.

So it is important to conduct a quick analysis to determine the patient’s feasibility to pay. You should offer easy-to-access payment options. For example, you can ask your clients to pay via credit, debit cards, or any other online as well as conventional methods. 

In addition to this, you must follow a systematic procedure to the aware patients about their financial responsibility. You can adopt the following strategies. 

• Establish clear terms with your patients 
• Reminding them about co-pays, deductibles, or due payments through the proper channel 

• Security and HIPAA Compliance 

Security always remains a primary concern for not only physicians but also for your clients. So for a successful primary billing process, effective and transparent security policies are crucial. Healthcare providers should make all possible efforts to protect the privacy and confidentiality of their patients.  Hence physician medical billing services must be HIPAA compliant. 

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ensures the protection of healthcare information from scams, and theft, and addresses limitations on healthcare insurance coverage. 

• No Coding Errors

Medical coding is critical to successful physician billing services. Because the entire billing process depends on the accurate transformation of patient diagnosis and medical procedure into universal standard codes. Coders extract this information from medical records and physicians’ notes. 

It is quite a complex as well as a time-consuming procedure. Therefore you must hand over this responsibility to a dedicated team who shares a single purpose. That is to maximize the profitability of your medical business. Moreover, make sure that your billing task force consists of highly trained and certified medical coders who can perform this task in an effective manner. 

Erroneous coding can lead to claim denials, which ultimately slows down the primary billing process. The most common errors are incorrect, mismatched, missing codes, upcoding, under coding, or incorrect modifiers. 

• Proper Claims Management  

The streamlined cash flow mainly depends on the timely submission of clean claims. Therefore for a successful primarily billing process, you must pay attention to the appropriate management of claims. For example, physician medical billing experts should submit the claims before cross-checking the following information: 

• Patient information (Name, date of birth, address, phone number, etc. )
• Medical codes
• Insurance information (insurance ID, Policy, patient’s eligibility verification)
• Duplicate claims 
• Poor Medical Documentation

There are many physicians, that still believe in the outdated methods of data collection, processing, and manual submission of claims. These traditional techniques can increase the chances of mistakes, which affects the efficiency of the primary billing process. Therefore, physicians should invest in the electronic submission of claims. Because less human interference can improve the physician billing process by reducing errors. 

• Regular Follow-up 

Most physicians leave the ball in insurance companies’ courts after the submission of medical claims. They don’t follow up on the claims, which negatively affects the entire physician revenue cycle management. Therefore it is important that your billing team has access to the advanced tracking software to monitor the submitted claims. They should track every single claim until a physician gets paid. Moreover, regular follow-ups also prevent claim denials. 

The above-mentioned steps are crucial for the successful billing process. Sometimes physicians decide to build an in-house billing department. But with the passage of time, they notice an increase in the financial as well as an administrative burden. 

Because they have to spend a greater amount on the overall operational costs including hiring and training of billing staff, office workspace, and purchase of innovative billing tools. Moreover, they can’t provide quality care to their patients and end up with stress, frustration, and a slow revenue cycle. They should adopt innovative physician billing solutions to overcome these challenges. 

Most healthcare providers prefer to outsource physician medical billing services to achieve the financial stability of their business. If you are facing challenges to keep your billing process tight, you must think about outsourcing. 

Are you looking for a reliable billing partner? Then look no further. Medcare MSO is a top-notch medical billing company in the United States. That helps health care providers to keep their physician billing services up-to-date and on track. For more information about how we can help you with Physician Medical billing and Coding call us at +1 800 640 6409