As a healthcare provider, there are many ways that your medical billing errors may negatively impact your revenue. This is why it is incredibly important to tidy up your billing process. By doing so, you can minimize your billing issues and maximize your revenue at the same time.
Not only does this make financial sense, but making sure your medical billing process is organized, streamlined, and efficient will give you greater peace of mind and the ability to make more informed, holistic decisions based on the financial health of your healthcare organization. With that said, we’ve compiled 3 different billing issues that are commonplace and may be causing you to lose revenue. By calling out these typical errors, we hope that you recognize them and are better prepared to avoid them in the first place.
1. Your Patient Information Is Incorrect
Having the correct patient information necessary for billing and collecting is absolutely crucial to maximizing your revenue. With incorrect or missing information, you don’t even have the contact details for each patient. This obviously complicates and can throw the entire billing and collection process awry. So be sure to check with your patients each time they come in for a service or treatment. Then update their contact information as well as their insurance and financial details every single time. Writing out a script to follow each time new patients register and returning patients visit will ensure that you have an easy way to collect the correct, up-to-date specifics.
2. You Have Poor Coding that Leads to Errors
Another billing issue that can cause lots of errors for you is poor, inaccurate coding. Diagnostic and treatment codes may not always be correctly aligned when it comes to your medical billing information. And mismatched coding ends up causing errors that may cost you revenue. It’s super easy to accidentally enter the wrong code or miss or add a single character to a field. Especially if you aren’t using up-to-date code sets, your insurance companies are going to reject your claims. This is a huge hassle because it requires you to examine those rejected claims and process them a second time to get your rightful claims. If you even have time and manpower to do that. Always have the most updated versions of medical billing and coding regulations. Additionally, automate your claims process to minimize the amount of coding errors that lead to claim rejections.
3. You’re Not Informing Your Patients About Financial Responsibility
Do your patients know what their full financial responsibility is when they decide to see one of your providers or come to your practice for treatment? Your patients need to be aware of their financial obligations at the time of service or treatment. This way your payment policy is adhered to as often as possible and collections can be processed smoothly. Simplify your medical bills for patients so they easily understand what their financial responsibility is. This will probably also lead to an uptick in your medical collections because your repayment plans are that much more understandable.
All of these medical billing issues can spell disaster for your healthcare organization’s revenue if you aren’t vigilant about staying on top of them and preventing them from occurring. However, we understand that this is a lot to think about and you may not have the amount of staff you need to smoothly manage them. That’s where our team of experienced representatives steps in to ease your collections process. Frost-Arnett leads collections with empathy while preserving your patient-provider relationships. Contact us at 1 (855) 287-7043.