The importance of ensuring your medical billing is completely correct cannot be underestimated.
Any errors can prove too costly with a practice not only having to pay back any overcharge, but also risking incurring a large fine.
It is also vital for a medical practice to ensure they receive timely payment for their services.
However, all too often a disorganized practice fails to follow up with patients and insurance companies leaving their accounts in a terrible mess.
One piece of advice doctors should probably ignore is to save money by looking after the paperwork themselves.
This is a big mistake as it results in lost productivity, inefficiency and errors as the doctors try to juggle several tasks all at once.
Doctors can actually increase their profits by spending more time seeing patients and employing a trained medical billing expert or outsourcing the work to another firm.
Concentrating on what they are good at will also take pressure off the doctor and provide a better service for the patients.
Doctors or office managers cannot and should not try to do several things at once as this can lead to mistakes.
Even the smallest mistake on a medical billing claim form can cause huge delays in payments being made to the practice by insurance companies; or in a worst case scenario could result in a fraud claim against the practice.
If an office manager is trying to deal with telephone queries and other requests, they should set aside a quiet period to deal with just medical billing.
If this is not possible due to the workload of the office manager, then the practice really should seek outside help for its billing process.
Some practices may sit back and wait for the insurance to come through with payments, but this is a mistake also.
It is necessary to keep chasing up on claims to see if they have been accepted by the insurance company and if so when the payment will be processed.
Waiting for the insurance companies to deliver can end up costing a practice tens of thousands of dollars each year.
Having an automated rather than a manual system is a good way to help overcome any follow-up issues and reduce payment delays.
To run a successful medical practice you need a good reliable team that you can trust and ideally a good automated system.
Medical billing is an important process within the practice and if you don't have a well qualified person able to do the task then it could be worthwhile outsourcing it to another firm.
Having an organized and well run practice will not only increase productivity and increase revenue, but will also help maintain a healthy relationship with the patients and insurance companies.