With Obama care enactment, more and more patients now prefer out-of-pocket payment for medical services. They prefer it this way because the insurance companies distribute the enormous payments on their insurance plan, which is easier to repay in the long-term. Where this is soothing for the patients, the same process increases the claim payments for the hospitals, who then have to hire the services of medical billing and coding professionals to get the payments.
But many medical billing and coding services just charge too much for processing the payments, that’s why many try not to opt for them. But there are ways through which the healthcare units can save time and money while hiring medical billers and coders.
- Hire on percentage based commissions
A medical billing service, just like any other professional company is looking to increase its profit. The best way to do that is to incentivize it that the payment will be on the percentage of the number of claim-payment retrieved. In this way, they will be more eager to pursue the cases and will provide the payments at the earliest. Not only will this improve your unit’s efficiency, but it will also allow you to save more cost.
Think it this way: When you hire a medical biller that doesn’t pursue the claim and charges for the claims submitted, you pay him when the claim is submitted. But what if it gets rejected? He won’t be responsible for it because the claim rejection is associated with the discrepancy in bill-payment, services acquired or code mismatch.
But if the same medical billing company is hired for retrieval of all payments, they will be more than eager to get the job done
- Outsource medical coding job as well
Many might read it suspiciously, but outsourcing medical coding job will have a better effect in the future. Suppose that you have a medical coder in-house and a medical billing service for claim submission. Now, if the claim is rejected, there is a possibility that the medical billing service will say that the codes mismatched, or may blame the medical coder indirectly. The medical biller and the medical coder, both have to work together to retrieve claimed payments. Therefore it is better to outsource both to the medical billing service because in that way the efficiency of the hospital will increase and medical billing service will be able to perform its duty much more promptly.
Let the medical billing service take care of the dirty work.
- You worry of staff turnover
As all the transactional work is now outsourced, a physician will not have to worry about staff turnover in the billing department. Not only will it save him more time to focus on the tasks at hand but then the healthcare unit even has the option to hire more customer service staff or to even expand the unit itself.
Moreover, as the department has been outsourced, there will be no need to invest in practice management software and hardware, which will save further costs.
According to various studies, physicians get almost 30% increase in revenue by outsourcing the services to a competent billing service that knows the job in and out.
Conclusion:
A claim processing is the economic lifeblood of any medical unit; the medical unit management needs to devise a clever strategy that not only increases the revenue of the unit but also increases its efficiency. This is not a one-time job and trial, and error is part of the whole process.
