Medical Billing Tips That Can Help Improve Collections
In order for your medical practice to be successful and profitable, medical billing and collection need to be a smooth and efficient practice. However, each year this can seem like a mounting battle, not just to collect payments from patients, but also from insurance companies as well. While there’s nothing you can do to get every single customer to pay, there are a number of tips that may help to improve collections in your practice. These are described below.
1. Collect Immediately Following Service
One of the best ways to recoup the money you are owed is to ask the patient to pay you either at the time or immediately following the service they receive. Most patients understand that they will be responsible for paying at least a portion of their bill, and this reminder could be all that they need to clear it. It’s a good idea to set expectations with each payment prior to providing a service and to ensure that anything they won’t be paying for is fully covered by their insurance. Posting signs around your office which mention upfront payments is also a good idea.
2. Make It Easy to Pay
Any payment that you do not collect immediately after service will be harder to obtain, so it’s important that any mail you send to your patients is easy to read. The payment terms should be easily spelled out, as should the methods of payment. You should send these letters as close to the patient’s service as possible when their treatment is still fresh in their mind and they are more likely to pay. Practices that allow online billing may also see more bills getting paid. There are a number of open source medical billing providers you can use to facilitate this.
3. Ensure All Charges are Captured
In order to ensure you don’t miss collecting any payments, it’s important that all of your charges are documented. You should also ask a coding professional to ensure your coding is correct; you can either outsource this to a third party or hire someone for the job in-house. In addition, your practice should implement procedures to ensure that a claim is sent for every captured charge. Electronic health record systems provide a great way to do this.
4. Minimize Denials
Finally, one last thing that your medical practice should be working towards is minimizing the number of denials that you receive. Your front desk staff should be trained to be as accurate as possible when it comes to medical billing, and when a denial does occur, the reason for this should be established so as to minimize the chance of it happening again. In addition, any denials should be dealt with as soon as possible without involving the patient unless absolutely necessary.
Accurate medical billing is essential if you want to increase your company’s cash flow and improve efficiency. The above tips should help you with this. Let us know if they did in the comments below.
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