Outsource Receivables Inc. (ORI) understands exactly what it means to guide our clients through a big commitment. Our featured case study for November is about one outsource medical billing project.
In January of 2012, a local surgery clinic came to ORI looking for a new medical billing outsource partner. Their current provider was not providing the level of services necessary. The clinic was also in the midst of changing the practice management system and EMR. ORI saw this project as a wonderful opportunity to partner with ECW to provide the services the surgery clinic needed to successfully onboard the new system. When the slate is “wiped clean”, as it was in this situation, both ORI and ECW were able to fully partner with the clinic to understand their needs and customize the EMR and practice management system to the clinic’s needs.
Getting things done requires time and efficient project planning for outsource medical billing to suceed. To better understand what was needed by the clinic, the EMR company visited multiple times to work with the clinic staff and ORI to better understand the practice and how the systems could be customized for the clinic and also integrate seamlessly with ORI’s proprietary paperless, workflow feeder system.
As the EMR company was training the clinic staff on their software, ORI was also training staff on the authorization and medical billing side. We were able to fully integrate the new practice management system with ORI’s proprietary system to ensure records were scrubbed and delivered in top shape for our medical billing to take place. Clean coding and records are important to quick payments and ensures a clinic’s consistent cash flow.
Within this clinic, a coding manager is onsite who reviews all of the coding done by the physicians. Having a person in this position, on the client side, is important for this clinic to ensure all of the doctors were coding procedures correctly and to maximize reimbursement. Proper coding is critical to getting paid on time.
One of the most crucial pieces to the puzzle is setting up the outsource medical billing systems and clearinghouse. In this case, the client used the clearinghouse integrated in the practice management system. A collaborative effort between the EMR company and ORI was made to make sure the clearinghouse was set up properly to ensure prompt payments from payors from the start of the project. ORI’s team of experts in medical billing was especially important at this stage in the set-up process.
Another important piece of the onboarding process was, ORI reviewing and consulting on how to generate patient’s self-pay portions of their bill at the time of service. Helping the clinic staff understand and learn to use the tools available to them even before a patient enters the clinic has helped lessen the number of days it takes the clinic to get paid.
With six months of billing underway the feedback from our client was exceptionally positive. One of the most beneficial aspects of working with ORI on this has been the clinic’s steady cash flow. The EMR company had warned the client that this large of a change could cause them to drop up to 60% in medical billing production due to staff learning curves. Because of the clinic’s great team, ORI’s responsiveness, and staff training no drop in cash flow was felt by the clinic relating to the new project. Much of this ground was made up in accounts receivables 90 plus days dropping to just 6% of their overall A/R. This statistic is a very good example of the benefit ORI brings to every client in our ability to seamlessly onboard a new client partner.
Some of the top benefits our client noted in working with ORI include:
- ORI’s willingness to work with everyone involved to get everything set up and running.
- ORI’s ability and willingness to help set and obtain objectives important to the practice.
- ORI’s ability to customize activities and technologies to the clinic.
- ORI’s responsiveness. ORI set daily meetings with this client during the initial phase to ensure all implementation was happening on schedule, training was being completed, and objectives were being met. That schedule moved to weekly meetings will soon be scaled back to monthly meetings.
Undertaking a very large project such as changing practice management, EMR systems, and professional medical billing companies all at once can seem to be an insurmountable challenge. You can rest assured, Outsource Receivables Inc. is up to the challenge and will be there to hand-hold your clinic through the process.