Avoid Long Patient Collection Periods With Periodic Evaluation
Patient co-pays, deductibles, and self-pays are dominating the revenue cycle among third-party payers. It calls for attention and commitment to help your practice to prosper financially. Periodic assessments of patient collections can expose any disorganization that disrupts your growth, securing a smoother cash flow. Here are some guide questions when conducting your periodic evaluation:
1. Do you Have a Dedicated Staff for Accounts Receivable?
It’s easy to file claims or bills and then forget about them. However, aging bills will slow down your collection process and frustrate payers and patients alike without a committed account receivable staff. You should establish a thorough monitoring system for claims to discourage bills from languishing without attention after 30, 60, or even 90 days without follow-up.
2. Does your Scheduling Collect All Required Patient Details?
Your scheduling process sets the foundation for your claims and final collections. Before any service is rendered, ensure that your front office collects all relevant and needed information. Knowing what data is required by providers, government programs, and payer contracts before they are reimbursed will assist in developing an effective intake form. Collection predicaments can easily be prevented by training your staff to verify insurance, create copies of necessary documents, and collect co-pays, deductibles, and self-pay funds in advance.
3. Do you Audit Regularly for Codes?
To track the continuing efforts of correct claim submissions, you should periodically integrate coding audits. It will help indicate if you need an update when codes and modifiers change. You should also take a look at frequent staff turnover as one of the root causes of your coding errors. New employees that need more training can greatly impact your collection process. Solve your employee deficiencies first to ensure a stable improvement of your coding efficiencies.
4. Do you Track your Denied Claims?
You’re having an unhealthy cash flow if you frequently have denied and rejected claims. Nourish it by looking for a pattern then eliminating the root cause. For instance, you can upgrade your billing software with a better code mechanism if it’s due to coding errors. It will also help to use a coding system from a trusted healthcare software provider whose experience can help address your problems.
5. Are Claims Submitted Promptly?
Slow claim submissions may be weighing down your cash flow. Claim submissions could be taking too long despite having an accurate and smooth coding process. Luckily, you can easily track payment issues and determine the speed of your collections with electronic procedures for remittance to payers. Payer contract and fee schedule helps payment posting to be quicker and more detailed. With automatic processes, zero, partial and low payments can be immediately detected and managed.
6. How to Evaluate Your Outsourced Billing
When you pass your collections to your partnered firm, be sure to monitor to see how long it'll take for them to show results. If they appear to be unreasonably slow to collect, then you should consider partnering with another company.
Partner with DrCatalyst
Today is your lucky day. We’re giving you a free comprehensive revenue cycle check-up with our medical billing experts to help you improve your patient collection. DrCatalyst offers end-to-end revenue cycle management services that will help your practice increase your revenue and reduce medical billing inefficiencies that hurt your cash flow.
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