How To Not Alienate Your Patients And Make A Foe :
Here’s the deal: You make appointments for your patients proactively, get the insurance details, and when the patients come visit, explain all the billing upfront based on real-time information from the carrier (deductible, copay, coinsurance etc), and when patients leave the office building, you give them the billing code for that visit jotted down on a piece of paper. Sounds like healthcare utopia? No, it is not, this could be your very own clinic being as “Accountable” as can be without compromising on your bottomline. For that to happen you need to keep the following 5 points in mind.
5 Tips To Make a Friend Out of Your Patients :
A . To set the ball rolling, your frontline; your people upfront, your schedulers and billing data entry clerks, need to be thoroughly trained, on both the nuances of getting information upfront from patients and getting that information entered or verified in the medical billing software or the EHR. This would go a long way in avoiding a lot of medical billing errors later on. Also knowing accurately upfront what the patient may owe will help in setting expectations right at the very start.
B. Another point, which concerns the frontline is the issue of constantly returning patients with aged balances. The billing desk should be shrewd enough to realize when a patient balance has run high enough, that a talk may be warranted with the patient regarding it. And this discussion has to done in the most tactful manner, so as to not cause any inconvenience. Any strong-arm tactic will only result in the clinic’s unpopularity among the local community. Also, a medical billing vendor may be sought in this regard to see if high-risk (high-deductible) patients can be brought under a single bucket, and they are somehow earmarked in the electronic software, like the EHR, and are regularly sent alerts to remind them of what they owe the clinic.
C. Submission targets for claims need to be set in stone; 24 hours should be the time frame for generation of claims and 10 days should be the maximum time limit for sending patient statements. Anything later than this, and you can rest assured there is an ongoing staff issue. Seeking a medical billing vendor at this juncture is the right and in fact only option.
D. A major point in which almost all the smaller clinics have issues is when it comes to analyzing claims submission performance. Continuous generation of the A/R Report or Monthly Report is paramount in gauging your clinic’s financial health. These reports tend to predict if there is an imminent problem looming Also reports need to be analyzed bucket-wise. Buckets may be formed by payor-class and by aging time-frames. If your staff find all this too much to intake, then seeking specialist report generators like a Revenue Cycle Management Company may be the only option. Also, the report generating capacities of a software (E.g. EHR) needs to be completely understood in order to generate effective reports. This, more often than not would fall under the purview of an EHR support vendor.
E. Finally, once a visit comes to a close, it would be a wise move to let the patient know exactly what had transpired and what might be expected on the billing front. Covert covering up and narrow-eyed demeanor of the staff will accomplish only one thing, leaving a bad taste in the patient’s mouth. Thus despite receiving high-quality medical care the patient may feel let down later on due to billing issues. Thus, advising your billing staff to be as open as possible about what patients owe may be a very bright idea.
BillingParadise Can Help You With That Utopia :
With a decade of hands-on experience in servicing over 500 clients when it comes to the RCM Cycle, BillingParadise could be that pal who can help you construct your very own little parcel of healthcare utopia. That is because we clearly understand that when it comes to managing medical billing, the process begins much before that first patient visit and right runs through till the balance becomes nil. Call BillingParadise at 888-571-9069 and allow us to help you to keep your patients happy, and thus consequently keep you in business.
