One of the hardest aspects of running a medical office is ensuring that patient claims are handled and paid in a timely manner. On the surface this sounds fairly easy, but in reality when you’re dealing with self-payers, insurance companies and multiple types of providers, keeping track of everything that it takes to run a smooth medical office can be quite daunting. Thankfully there are options including outsourcing your medical billing to an experienced team like Outsource Receivables.
We’ve taken the entire medical billing process and systemized it in such a way that our clients can boost cash flow and rest easy at night knowing that they’ll see a reduction in denials and an increase in profits. Below we’ll outline our keys to ensure your medical office stays cash flow positive in 2019!
Key Steps to Boost Cash Flow in 2019
- Ensure your medical team is completing charts in a timely manner – Your doctors have a lot on their plates including hitting their productivity numbers. Even so, it’s critical that they are completing their charts in a timely manner to ensure that your billing department can begin to process visits so that the process of receiving payment for your services can actually begin.
- Billing department and practice management system is working well together – It’s critical that your billing department is synchronized with whatever practice management system you’re using to kick out any claims that miss your initial set of requirements prior to them being sent off to the payer. This can help to reduce the number of denials, because as your billing department becomes more experienced, they should be learning from denials to ensure that they’re not repeated over and over again. This is why working with an outsourced medical billing office can be so beneficial because they’ve been exposed to a wide array of different scenarios and can often quickly advise a practice on how to reduce their denials. If this step in the process goes smoothly it can ensure that claims are sent to the payer almost instantaneously where they the payer then typically turns around and can pay the claims within 25-30 days.
- Set firm timelines – You want to establish firm timelines when your providers should have their charts locked, as well as when claims are submitted. Ideally you should strive to submit claims within 24 hours of the chart being locked.
- It’s all in the follow up – You need to have someone dedicated to working denials and self-pay on a regular basis. This person must be trained, scripted and able to ask for the money in a professional manner. It’s ideal that you respond within 48 hours of each insurance denial or patient inquiry. In addition, you’ll want to consistently generate statements on a weekly basis for any self payers so that these payments are consistently coming into your office to boost cash flow as you wait to receive money from your insured patients.
- Timeliness of posting payments – It’s also critical that when payments are received, they’re posted as quickly as possible. In addition, as mentioned above, it’s important that when denials are received, both the billing office and the physicians themselves understand how to hopefully make changes so that denials can be reduced and profitability can be increased.
Medical Billing is a Complex Pendulum
At Outsource Receivables, we like to think of the medical billing process as a pendulum. If all of the different areas are working symbiotically together, all goes smoothly, but if one area is out of sync, the entire process can quickly have problems. We like to think of our services as a way to always keep that pendulum in balance to ensure your practice runs smoothly and your cash flow remains steady month in and month out. To learn more about our company, feel free to reach out to our team today by phone at 866-585-2800.